Activity Team/FAQ

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Post questions here for the Activity Team.

About the Activity Team

Who is on the Activity Team?

See Activity Team/Contacts for a list of team members.

How can I get in contact with you?

Feel free to write messages on our talk pages, or just drop in on one of our meetings.

Activity Development questions

What Sugar Labs author resources should I be aware of?

For new Activities:

Create a Gitorious project repository at http://git.sugarlabs.org/ and start hacking on your code! :-)

Request a trac component for your activity at http://dev.sugarlabs.org/

Open a trac ticket to request addition to Pootle our translation system (if your strings are mature)

Add your Activity to http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap if you want to be on the SoaS distro

If your Activity is migrating over from the OLPC infrastructure:

See How to migrate from OLPC.

When releasing an existing Activity:

If you have one, update your wiki page at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/<actvity-name>

Upload your new .xo bundle, screenshots, notes to http://activities.sugarlabs.org/

Upload .bz2 source to shell.sugarlabs.org /upload/sugar/sources/honey (e.g., scp to download.sugarlabs.org:/srv/upload/sources ...)

Edit http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Source_Code and make sure it's pointing to your latest .bz2

Where do I find information about implementing X in Sugar?

Check Activity Team/Resources for a comprehensive list of developer documentation, tutorials and support channels.

How do I get my activity to install an external dependency?

You don't! Activity bundles are supposed to be self-contained, and not depend on anything else other than the standard Sugar platform. If you need additional dependancies, you will need to include them within your activity bundle. If your additional dependancies are binary, please be aware Sugar can be run on different machine architectures.

I have a question about Git, or Gitorious.

See Activity Team/Git FAQ for a specific FAQ about Git and Gitorious.

How do I upload my new activity to the Activities Library?

The best guide is Activity Team/How_to_migrate_from_OLPC, since that's where activities are coming from. As the infrastructure stabilizes and we get more new activities, we will post a new page.

How do I get my activity in the hands of students?

The absolute best way to get your activity out into the world is to attend an [OLPC:Deployment_meetings OLPC deployment meeting] and suggest it to the deployment representatives. They can test your activity and offer feedback, and will ultimately decide whether it ships.

Another good way is to post and promote your activity on activities.sugarlabs.org. This will get your activity into the hands of the G1G1 community and can be a stepping stone to getting included in the Sugar on a Stick distribution and in OLPC deployments.

Help! I suddenly can't push to Gitorious!

The OSUOSL which hosts Gitorious has an aggressive IP blacklist policy. If you once were able to push but now cannot, send an email to support@osuosl.org requesting that your IP be removed from the blacklist.

Is there a Commits mailing list?

Instead of a commits list, we use the RSS feed at http://git.sugarlabs.org/events.atom. This tracks the activity (commits, branches, comments, merge requests) of all projects hosted on Gitorious.

How do I get a trac component associated with my project?

File a ticket with the request. Please assign the ticket to the trac component, mark it as a task and don't forget to mention the name of your project and the default owner for the tickets.

How do I analyze my activity's memory usage?

Please refer to these pages for assistance in understanding the memory usage patterns of activities and the shell and for detecting leaks: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/MemoryUsageAnalysis and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Memory_leak_testing

How does one package an activity?

Save the setup.py file in the top directory of your activity development tree. To make an activity bundle, run the following code:

python setup.py dist_xo

An output bundle will be saved in the dist/ subdirectory. See also Activity bundles specification.

How can I find out what version of Sugar I am running?

You can go into the Sugar Control Panel; it is listed on the about-computer panel (which accesses jarabe.config.version).

From the Terminal, you can type:

rpm -q sugar

or you can:

grep version jarabe/config.py

or:

python -c "from jarabe import config; print config.version"

How do I know if my activity is running on an OLPC XO laptop?

You can test for the existence of '/etc/olpc-release':

if os.path.exists('/etc/olpc-release'):
    ...

How do I tell Sugar that my activity does not write any data to the Journal?

One of my activities is a game that does not produce any document in the journal. How do I inform Sugar?

Pass to Activity.__init__ create_jobject=False e.g.

class MyActivity(activity.Activity):
    def __init__(self, handle):
        activity.Activity.__init__(self, handle, create_jobject=False)

(But keep in mind http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1714)