Please see my homepage for contact information. You can also send emails to my sugarlabs.org and activitycentral.com accounts (silbe@). On FreeNode and OFTC my IRC nick is silbe.

Country
Germany
Timezone
CET (UTC+1) / CEST (UTC+2)

Medium to long term Sugar plans

The goals

  • Make it hard to loose work accidentally
  • Make it safe to run potentially untrusted or buggy code
  • Make Sugar easier and better to customise by users so they "feel at home" and work more efficiently
  • Attract developers
  • Increase interoperability with non-Sugar systems and parts thereof
  • Accessibility
  • real Single Sign On

The means

  • Modularise Sugar core so users / developers can mix-and-match
    • split the "zoom levels" into separate modules
      • on low memory systems (XO-1) a single executable handles all zoom levels by default
      • on all other systems there are separate executables
      • replacing a single (or multiple) zoom level(s) with alternative implementations possible
      • bugs in one zoom level don't affect the others
      • shared UI framework uses GTK instead of HippoCanvas, icon view allows Neighbourhood-like searching and list view allows Home View-like searching
    • split out the Journal
      • let user "bless" an activity to provide the special services (switch to Details View, Object Chooser)
    • split out the Frame
    • activity.info -> .desktop, activity and non-activity .desktop launcher on home screen
    • use XDG start-up notification instead of custom protocol
  • Rainbow
    • run each activity / application in a separate session, identifiable and killable from the Frame
      • show "activity start failed" screen if all processes finished (rainbow-run returns) before start-up notification has indicated the activity is running
      • if start-up notification times out, show "activity start failed" screen with option to wait a bit longer or abort
      • kill remaining processes on failure (timeout)
      • keep activities in Frame until all processes have exited
      • add option to kill session (i.e. all remaining processes) to Frame
    • "legacy sessions": start XDG applications in a session as describe above
      • full X session including window manager, using VNC
      • replace GTK file chooser dialog with Object Chooser invocation
      • set $HOME to temporary directory, save & restore the contents on Stop resp. resume
      • kills off window manager and "standard" daemons (e.g. gconf) after application returned
  • Replace copy of gnome-session with configuration files for and dependency on latest gnome-session (add link to Gnome bugzilla ticket)
  • Version support
    • eventually integrated with in-activity Undo/Redo
  • gpg-agent and/or gnome-keyring
    • in-Frame pinentry (allow/deny request, password optional) highlighting the activity (isolated session) that requested the operation
    • automatic "log-in" to (SL, XS) web sites using client "certificate" (server extracts public key and uses it for identification/authentication, supports multiple keys per account)
  • Telepathy client changes
    • interoperability with non-Sugar Telepathy clients
    • Account Manager (blessed activity or control panel section)
      • Salut account added by default, but deactivatable
      • not sure how exactly to handle it, but we should support registering to multiple XSs and require only a single UI interaction for doing so (add Jabber account automatically, but deactivatable like all others)