Activity Team

Mission

The Activity Team develops and maintains many of the activities available for Sugar. We also encourage independent developers to write activities, and we support them in their efforts. Our goal is to ensure that Sugar provides a complete set of high quality educational, collaborative, constructivist activities.

Our responsibilities

Develop and maintain the ecosystem of Sugar activities.
Recruit and mentor activity developers from the community.
Collect, document and organize new activity and activity feature ideas from the Education Team, deployments and community.
Work with the Development Team and the Infrastructure Team to ensure activity developers are well supported.
Gather feedback with the Deployment Team about how Sugar activities are doing in the field.

Creating a new activity

See Activity Team Resources.

Problems logging in to Gitorious?

Gitorious users are sometimes having their IP addresses incorrectly blacklisted by OSU-OSL, the organization that hosts git.sugarlabs.org. If your SSH key is rejected with the error "Access denied or bad repository path", please open a ticket by emailing support@ouosl.org.

This has happened to a number of activity authors and we are working on getting it resolved.

Activity Team users on activities.sugarlabs.org

Fake emails to identify users:

activity.team@sugarlabs.org activities that are supported by Activity Team
trash@dev.null activities to remove

Sugar Activities

There is an Activities page where we highlight Sugar activities in the wiki. (We need to discuss how best to manage the content of this page as well as how to manage the activity-specific sub-pages.)

Sugar Human Interface Guidelines

The Sugar Human Interface Guidelines content has also been migrated to Sugar Labs. This guide is a critical resource when designing activities. Wade 18:35, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Sugar Almanac

The Sugar Almanac content has been migrated to Sugar Labs. It's a great, quick reference when building python Activities.

Modify Activities

A guide has been written describing how to make simple modifications to popular Sugar activities. Examples include adding sounds to TamTam, blocks to TurtleArt, buttons to Calculate, etc.

Activity_Team/Modifing_an_Activity

setup.py

There is a handy utility that is a standard part of Sugar Activity bundles, setup.py. You should use it to create and update POT files, generate a MANIFEST file and update locale files, and create .xo and .tar files for distribution.

./setup.py genpot
./setup.py fix_manifest
./setup.py dist_xo
./setup.py dist_source

activities.sugarlabs.org

The Sugar Activity Library is our new user-facing portal for Sugar activities. The site uses the backend Mozilla built for Firefox and Thunderbird extensions at addons.mozilla.org, called Remora. To help out, check out Activity Library.

Wade 15:02, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Packaging activities discussion

We are currently discussing how to package activities in the future, in order to support all distributions. Please add your comments to the following pages.

Packaging
- should we remove "Activities" section from that page; all issues where moved to Activity_Status page alsroot 10:33, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
Packaging ideas

Move an activity

We need help moving activities over to Sugar Labs from OLPC's servers. This is a great way to get started helping out the Activity Team. See Activity Team/How_to_migrate_from_OLPC for instructions, and Activity Team/Activity Status for the list of activities that need to be moved.

While moving activities, it would be great to check that the .pot files are up to date and the MANIFEST is correct. This will really help out the distro packagers.

Wade 17:19, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

The Sugar Control Panel

While not strictly in the realm of Activities, it may be useful on occasion to add a section to the Sugar Control Panel. Things to keep in mind.

General Overview of git and gitorious

Gitorious is the web front-end to git, the revision control system that Sugar Labs uses for project hosting. Once you have migrated your project, as an Activity developer, you may encounter some of these questions.

Sugar Labs git FAQ
Git Community Book
John Wiegley has written an overview of git: Git from the bottom up.
Charles Duran from Harvard has written a lovely overview of git at Understanding Git Conceptually.
GNOME maintains a list of references to git for mortals.
Pro Git by Scott Chacon

Cross-platform compatibility

As Sugar is integrated into more distros and the hardware base expands, it is important to keep Activity developers informed of any issues they need be aware of. For example, when Sugar was only expected to run on the XO-1 laptop, it was safe to assume that the display was always 1200x900.

The Compatibility Tips page is a place to accumulate tips.

A typical update cycle

Anyone can contribute a patch to a Sugar Activity. The typical work cycle involves an interaction with the activity maintainer as follows:

make a clone (anyone)
make your changes (anyone)
mail your patch to sugar_devel (anyone)
make changes as per suggestions by the project maintainer and developer community (anyone)
push your changes (anyone)
request a merge (anyone)
write release notes (anyone)
tag the new version in git (project maintainer)
create the .xo and .tar files (project maintainer)
upload .tar to download.sugarlabs.org (project maintainer)
upload .xo to activities.sugarlabs.org (project maintainer)
update wiki documentation (anyone)

Project Ideas

The Activity Team always needs project ideas and suggestions. Post your ideas to Activity Team/Project Ideas.

If you see something here you would like to help with, please contact us.