0.94/Notes

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Sucrose 0.94 Release Notes

Introduction

Sucrose 0.94 is the latest version of the Sugar learning platform: Sugar promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software. Furthermore it provides a flexible and powerful platform for activity developers.

Sugar is Free and Open Source Software and consists of Glucose, the base system environment; and Fructose, a set of demonstration activities. This new release contains many new features, performance and code improvements, bug fixes, and translations.

What is new for users

Sugar ad hoc networks

To mimic the mesh behavior on devices where mesh hardware is not available and make the "under a tree"-scenario possible the Sugar ad hoc networks have been added. The feature adds three default ad hoc networks, for channel 1, 6, and 11. They are represented with designated icons in the Neighborhood view. Simon Schampijer from OLPC has been working on this feature and has also back ported it to Sugar 0.84.

What's new for developers

The following changes are important for developers using the Sucrose 0.94 developer platform.

Widgets

Addressentry, Iconentry

API

Sugar does print warnings about the deprecated activity.info fields.

• Use 'bundle_id' instead of 'service_name'.
• Use 'exec' instead of 'class'.

Please adjust your activity.info file as soon as possible.

Activity Authors guidelines

There are still many activities that do not use the new activity toolbars introduced in 0.86. We encourage activity authors to use the new toolbars as there have been huge improvements in usability (e.g., stopping an activity).

Jim Simmons has written a guide to writing Sugar Activities (Please see Make your own Sugar Activities!) which details how to convert your activity to the new toolbars while still keeping backward compatibility with older Sugar versions.

What's new for packagers

• The Sugar package depend now on xdg-user-dirs (e.g. the rpm is called xdg-user-dirs in Fedora). The dependency is needed by the code that determines the path of the DOCUMENTS folder used in the Journal.
• ethtool is used in Sugar to determine the wireless firmware version displayed in the Control Panel. This have not been noted as dependency yet, even though used for a while already, if you have not listed it yet, please add it.

Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n)

still to come...

Compatibility

There a no known compatibility issues, as of today.

Update to this version

Please use the instructions for your distribution (SoaS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.) of choice to upgrade to this release. Note that it may take a while until the release is packaged for each distribution. Please stay tuned for distribution specific announcements and watch out for updates at Get Sugar.

Getting the sources

If you want to package Sugar for your favorite distribution or just want to examine Sugar's lovely code here are the released bundles. If you are interested in the full changelog you can use the Sugar git repositories.

Glucose modules

• sugar 0.93.3
• sugar-datastore 0.93.2
• sugar-toolkit 0.93.2
• sugar-base 0.93.2
• sugar-presence-service 0.90.2
• sugar-artwork 0.93.3
• etoys 4.1.2390
• hulahop 0.8.2

Fructose modules

• Pippy 40
• Browse 123
• Calculate 37
• Etoys 116
• Chat 70
• TurtleArt 114
• Jukebox 20
• Log 24
• ImageViewer 17
• Write 73

Looking forward to 0.96

For 0.96 we plan to focus on some architectural work that won't have a direct impact as perceived by most users. Sugar is a very thin layer of code that sits on top of hundreds of other components developed by other projects. There are ongoing changes to the components we depend on most directly, and we need to adapt Sugar to those changes so it keeps being shipped by Linux distributions and benefits from future improvements.

The changes include that the Python bindings for GNOME will be available dynamically through GObjectIntrospection rather then through the current static bindings provided by PyGTK. So a goal for 0.96 will be to port Sugar and all the activities to GNOME 3 through GObjectIntrospection.

Planning of the next release cycle has started at 0.96/Roadmap.

Credits

Many people contributed to this release indirectly, including testing, documentation, translation, contributing to the Wiki, outreach to education and developer communities. On behalf of the community, we give our warmest thanks to the developers and contributors who made this Sugar release possible.

We want to especially thank:

• the Infrastructure team which does all this great work in the background without which the development would not be possible at all,

• the deployments that provide the development team with feedback from the field,

• the Design team which guided the design of features with UI changes or impact on the workflow,

• the Translation team which makes sure that Sugar is enjoyable in the local languages of our users,

• the developers that submit patches for new features and bug fixes and do review other's patches,

• the maintainers that make sure their code is shippable and which provide packagers with new tarballs,

• the packagers which provide distributions with new Sugar packages,

• the SoaS team for providing a Sugar version to test with during the development cycle,

• the testers for finding the small and bigger issues,

• the release team and Development team for coordinating those efforts.