Time |
Nick |
Message |
18:39 |
mchua |
#chair sdziallas |
18:39 |
|
I'm not sure the #chair command works here, but okay. |
18:39 |
|
sdziallas: Let's finish the picking of Activities so we can build the iso and explain to folks what's going on. |
18:40 |
sdziallas |
mchua: OH NOES I CAN HAZ NO CHAIR ;) |
18:40 |
|
mchua: yeah, right. |
18:41 |
|
alright, so. we've browse on our list and were discussing which other activities we wanted to add. |
18:42 |
mchua |
kicks gobby to connect |
18:42 |
|
Aha, there we go. |
18:42 |
|
sdziallas: Yep. What's next after Browse? |
18:43 |
sdziallas |
mchua: well... we were Physics / TurtleArt / Record / Write, last time. |
18:44 |
|
(the latter ones are half-ish broken, though Record... *could* work) |
18:45 |
|
#link https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sugar_Activities |
18:45 |
|
(for reference) |
18:45 |
mchua |
looking at the list |
18:47 |
|
TurtleArt is exceptionall well-maintained. |
18:47 |
|
er, exceptoinally. |
18:47 |
|
AGH |
18:47 |
sdziallas |
nods. |
18:47 |
mchua |
very. |
18:47 |
sdziallas |
LOL! |
18:47 |
|
:) |
18:47 |
|
yeah, so let's add that one. |
18:47 |
mchua |
Physics also seems pretty on top of things. |
18:48 |
|
I wonder if it's worth asking Activity maintainers to submit their things for consideration for SoaS, so we know they actually want to be on there? |
18:48 |
sdziallas |
well, it bundles a good chunk of stuff, but since it's already packaged and certainly popular, we should go for it. |
18:48 |
mchua |
(Maybe after this initial pick, though.) |
18:48 |
|
nods. |
18:48 |
sdziallas |
I suppose we won't hear from many folks then. |
18:48 |
|
nods. |
18:48 |
mchua |
So TurtleArt is in, Physics is in? |
18:48 |
sdziallas |
yes. |
18:49 |
mchua |
Okay. Now, Record... I'm a bit torn. It's a great Activity, but we can't... expect it'll work well on a lot of computers with its current state. |
18:49 |
satellit__ |
chat? |
18:49 |
mchua |
Plus a lot of computers don't even have webcams. |
18:49 |
sdziallas |
yes, but... |
18:49 |
|
mchua: so it works here for me with my webcam and I know that Fedora has continuously these "better webcam support" features. |
18:49 |
|
mchua: but there *are* things that may randomly break Record. |
18:50 |
|
(and it's not really maintained, either) |
18:50 |
mchua |
How actively is it being maintained? |
18:50 |
|
Ah. |
18:50 |
sdziallas |
So alsroot has been fixing stuff. |
18:50 |
mchua |
pulls up gitorious in the background, as well as aslo. |
18:50 |
sdziallas |
But he says that the codebase is so complicated that a rewrite would make more sense. |
18:51 |
mchua |
The last patch was in June 2009. |
18:51 |
sdziallas |
Heh. |
18:51 |
mchua |
Before then, it was April 2009. |
18:51 |
sdziallas |
That's comparatively young... :p |
18:51 |
|
semi-joking. |
18:51 |
mchua |
It's... yeah, I can believe alsroot's statements. |
18:52 |
|
So here's my question for both Record and Write, and for other things that may be borderline like this: |
18:52 |
|
do we lose anything by adding these to the "you can install from ASLO!" encouragement list? |
18:52 |
alsroot |
is hacking Record right now, to fix http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1847 and http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1848 |
18:53 |
mchua |
alsroot, what do you think? You've got a better handle on the state of Record code than we do. |
18:53 |
|
I think that putting it as a "get from ASLO" does a few things. |
18:53 |
|
(1) it removes the "ZOMG PACKAGE" extra step, allowing us to have less work and to be more agile about updating the code (maybe) because it only has to get updated in one place. |
18:54 |
|
(2) it sets a different level of expectation than something that "ships by default" - try this thing out, it may or may not work with your webcam. |
18:54 |
|
if it does, that's extra bonus cool. If it doesn't, you didn't necessarily expect it to, you were just trying that out. |
18:55 |
sdziallas |
(side-noting that most of the activities on these lists are packaged, some aren't, but there are more we haven't even looked at. anyhow, generally +1.) |
18:55 |
alsroot |
is wondering when soas switched from getting-from-aslo-as-is to repackage-all-activities |
18:55 |
|
mchua: the thing is, we need ASLO in anycase |
18:56 |
sdziallas |
alsroot: right now. but it's "package-a-small-number-of-activities" - or at least we're turning it that way :) |
18:57 |
mchua |
alsroot: Well, it went from "let's stick .xo files in" for the first 2 versions to "we're a Fedora Spin for build infrastructure maintenance sanity" for this upcoming release. |
18:58 |
|
alsroot: with the Fedora Spin stuff comes the "everything must be packaged" criteria - which is a little extra work, but has the benefit of making sure licenses, etc. are cleaned up, libraries split out, and such. |
18:59 |
|
alsroot: But the number of Activities we shipped by default are way too many to turn into good packages, and a good portion of those Activities don't work anyway (lack of maintenance, etc) so we're paring down to a small number that *do* work, that will be packaged (or are already packaged) and maintained, and tested and (informally) supported |
18:59 |
|
alsroot: and making really, really good "hey, there's this thing called ASLO... why not try it out?" resources for a bunch more. |
18:59 |
|
I think if part of the out-of-the-box experience /is/ exploring ASLO, that's not a bad thing at all. |
18:59 |
|
sdziallas: Feel free to jump in and correct me. ;) |
19:00 |
sdziallas |
mchua: I'm totally +1 to that. |
19:00 |
|
(works very well with our "explore" principle, too :) |
19:01 |
mchua |
yup. |
19:01 |
alsroot |
mchua: well, I guess answer is pretty common, just post activity bugs to bugs.sl.o, can't see better way |
19:01 |
mchua |
alsroot: Yeah, but if there's no active maintainer (Browse is an example of this) the bugs don't get fixed. It's... a problem we need to fix. |
19:02 |
|
alsroot: Basically, as the de facto maintainer of Record, what would you think about Record not shipping by default in SoaS, but instead being one of the "here's ASLO, try downloading this to see if it works" Activities? |
19:03 |
|
or to rephrase - "any objections?" ;) |
19:04 |
alsroot |
mchua: for me, ASLO is the main deployment scheme, I'm tracking what is current verison on ASLO etc. -- at the end I don't see (for me as current Record maintainer) any differences if Record will be shiped w/ soas or not |
19:04 |
mchua |
alsroot: Ok, then I think that makes the decision easy. :) |
19:05 |
|
sdziallas: I propose Record and Write be on our "install from ASLO!" list. |
19:05 |
sdziallas |
mchua: granted, approved, noted! could you #action this? |
19:05 |
mchua |
sdziallas: In fact, I propose that we just take a look at the remainder of the package list and simply list the ones that are up-to-date in well-maintained fedora packages and pick the shortlist from there. |
19:05 |
|
#action Record and Write are on the "install from ASLO" documentation-ninjahood list. |
19:05 |
sdziallas |
(for now, heh.) |
19:05 |
alsroot |
anyway, due to nature of ASLO, public ASLO activities should work on all declared SPs |
19:06 |
sdziallas |
(leaving out write is pretty hefty, but since it's not really working... heh:) |
19:06 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Write is *so* broken right now. |
19:06 |
|
sdziallas: I might be able to pump QA resources into checking it out and trying to push for dev resources to fix it up in time for GA, but... that's a slim shot. |
19:06 |
sdziallas |
mchua: right. I found Mel's bugs and... it's so sad, yeah. |
19:06 |
|
mchua: one step... ;) |
19:07 |
mchua |
sdziallas: $5 |
19:07 |
|
alsroot: *nod* |
19:07 |
sdziallas |
mchua: thx! :) |
19:07 |
mchua |
sdziallas: okay, so on the remaining list on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sugar_Activities are there any more Activities we know are well-maintained both codewise and as Sugar packages? |
19:07 |
|
er, RPMs? |
19:08 |
|
er, packages in Fedora? |
19:08 |
|
sometimes does not actually speak English. |
19:08 |
|
sdziallas: I'll note that we can also do a quick first pass here, and then explain stuff to the various lists with criteria for inclusion and how the few Activities that made it on there fit those, and then let people remind us of other well-maintained ones over the weekend. |
19:08 |
|
Tuesday is Beta freeze, which is soon, but still a few days out. |
19:09 |
|
So there is a little time for a few people to respond. |
19:09 |
sdziallas |
possibly etoys? (pippy & read are broken, too) terminal? visualmatch? |
19:09 |
mchua |
And I'd like a working minimal .ks asap. |
19:09 |
sdziallas |
grins sadly. |
19:09 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Do you know they work well and are maintained well, or are these things we should check into? |
19:09 |
sdziallas |
looking at this list under that assumption shows just more drastically how broken all this is. |
19:09 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Well, knowing the bugs is the first step to fixing 'em. |
19:10 |
sdziallas |
mchua: etoys is taken care of by some RH guy + OLPC folks, so that should be alright. |
19:10 |
|
mchua: no, I mean "being actively maintained" |
19:10 |
|
mchua: I wouldn't classify many activities as that. |
19:10 |
|
mchua: terminal is just... terminal. |
19:10 |
mchua |
so there's "the code is actively being developed by an upstream with a responsive maintainer" |
19:10 |
sdziallas |
mchua: and visualmatch is maintained by walter, saying all ;) |
19:10 |
mchua |
and "the software is packaged in Fedora by a responsive maintainer" |
19:11 |
sdziallas |
mchua: heh. |
19:11 |
mchua |
sdziallas: you can do the Fedora package maintenance for a few, but not too many. |
19:11 |
|
sdziallas: or... well, maybe you can, but you shouldn't. |
19:11 |
sdziallas |
mchua: well, we need activities to be packaged in a day or two. |
19:11 |
mchua |
sdziallas: so we can take a *few* Activities with really good upstreams that don't package, and etoys seems like a logical fit for that. |
19:11 |
|
sdziallas: if you don't mind the packaging workload, I mean. |
19:12 |
sdziallas |
mchua: I don't see many maintainers doing that responsively. |
19:12 |
mchua |
Just like I can tackle Browse's general brokenness with a higher QA/support workload on my part in order to allow us to include it - but I can't do that for more than, perhaps, one other Activity. So the rest of the Activities need to have working code, for me. |
19:12 |
sdziallas |
mchua: I think we can just jump on the etoys train, that should work (i.e. not much work for me, actually, since people package that alrady) |
19:12 |
|
nods. |
19:12 |
|
...and goes adding etoys. |
19:12 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Oh, okay. so Etoys definitely has an active dev/user community, the code's up to date, it's easy to reach them... and Someone Else is packaging it responsibly. |
19:12 |
|
Ideal case situation. |
19:12 |
|
Yay! |
19:13 |
|
Pippy and Read are out, if they're broken. |
19:13 |
|
VisualMatch... |
19:13 |
|
looks at git |
19:14 |
|
I know the CFS deployment has had successful test runs with it - Lynne May has played with it a lot and hasn't been able to break it yet. |
19:14 |
|
Last updated 2/23, so fairly recent. |
19:15 |
sdziallas |
Heh, cool. so it's in :) |
19:15 |
mchua |
adds one more check - git, aslo, and trac |
19:15 |
|
looks at bugs for visualmatch |
19:16 |
|
huh, we're developing a way for quickly assessing activity health. |
19:16 |
sdziallas |
nods. SOP time, heh? :p |
19:16 |
mchua |
Yeah, eventually. :) |
19:16 |
|
I'm going to be lazy and just leave the logs up and the next time this has to be done will probably write a SOP and get someone else to do it. |
19:16 |
|
I think. |
19:17 |
|
So, visualmatch not doing so well on the trac front - only one bug ever reported (by you, actually) and never closed, 3 months ago. |
19:17 |
|
http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1637 |
19:17 |
|
That having been said, it's not a bad bug. |
19:17 |
|
And I think that's about on par for bug reporting for Activities, sadly. |
19:17 |
|
Most of them don't have an active Trac workflow, is the impression that I get. |
19:18 |
|
I'm happy with visualmatch being in. |
19:18 |
sdziallas |
oups, I should have taken care of this. (though not many folks will use that way I describe there anyway.) |
19:18 |
|
okay. |
19:18 |
mchua |
sdziallas: let's talk about terminal, and then I want to look at our list of 5 (or 6) and do a quick sanity check. |
19:19 |
sdziallas |
mchua: I'd like to run quickly through the list of non-included activities then to make sure we don't miss anything, yeah. |
19:19 |
|
but terminal first. |
19:19 |
mchua |
Ok - pulling up aslo, gitorious, trac... |
19:20 |
|
http://activities.sugarlabs.or[…]/sugar/addon/4043 |
19:20 |
|
last update 1/16 |
19:20 |
|
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/terminal |
19:20 |
sdziallas |
ah, cool. |
19:20 |
mchua |
wade and sayamindu - sparse fixes, but looks like good ones. |
19:21 |
|
http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/quer[…]ity&col=milestone |
19:21 |
sdziallas |
oups! |
19:22 |
mchua |
Not bad, actually! |
19:22 |
|
I'd want to give it a quick smoke test run to make sure it's ok and that we can't casually break it. |
19:22 |
|
sdziallas: unless you've used it recently and feel good about it. |
19:22 |
sdziallas |
mchua: I haven't had issues lately. |
19:23 |
|
(but didn't look too deeply) |
19:23 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Would you feel comfortable about it? or do you want me to take a hammer to it this weekend and we can make the final call tomorrow or sunday after that? |
19:24 |
sdziallas |
mchua: I'd be alright with adding it... temporarily. |
19:24 |
|
mchua: so if it fails, we'll take it out. but for now, it could be good. |
19:25 |
mchua |
Okay, i'll put it on my todo list to hit that hard this weekend. |
19:25 |
|
#action mchua test the living daylights out of Terminal |
19:25 |
|
and we'll see how it works. |
19:25 |
sdziallas |
grins. |
19:25 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Ok, so stepping back from the 6 activities we have so far... how many of those are going to be a nontrivial packaging workload on you? (i.e. how many are you going to have to maintain, and of those, are there any that are nontrivial?) |
19:26 |
|
From my side, Browse may be a potential resource suck in terms of QA and support. |
19:26 |
|
Terminal is an unknown quantity, I'm prepared for that to be my second (and last) QA/support heavy Activity, but don't expect it to be. |
19:26 |
sdziallas |
mchua: etoys is a nobrainer, I don't need to do anything for that. |
19:27 |
mchua |
The rest of the things - etoys, turtleart, visualmatch, physics - have other people taking very good care of them, and I can point folks in their direction, so I'm good there. |
19:27 |
sdziallas |
browse can become pretty hefty if xulrunner breaks, otherwise it should be good. |
19:27 |
|
mchua: ah, that's cool :) |
19:28 |
|
mchua: the other five activities... can be kept up2date with a reasonable amount of work, I guess. |
19:29 |
mchua |
So wait, you're packaging all of them? |
19:29 |
|
sdziallas: (one sec, let me shovel a piece of pizza into my mouth) |
19:30 |
sdziallas |
mchua: they are packaged, so I just need to keep them up2date. |
19:30 |
|
:) |
19:37 |
mchua |
back, nmo |
19:37 |
|
er, nom |
19:37 |
|
sdziallas: Okay, so you've pretty much just got browse too. |
19:38 |
sdziallas |
mchua: heh, yeah, browse is okay. |
19:38 |
mchua |
sdziallas: So you feel like you have bandwidth to maintain a little more if needed? |
19:38 |
sdziallas |
mchua: yes. |
19:38 |
mchua |
doesn't want to push this too far - we should feel like we're shipping with far too *little* for us to do |
19:38 |
|
okay. |
19:38 |
|
sdziallas: you drive - we'll go through the rest of the list now. |
19:38 |
sdziallas |
mchua: so I could still take another few activities. |
19:38 |
|
mchua: since this is - compared to before - much better. |
19:39 |
|
the James Simmons' ebook activities might make sense. Or Speak. Or...? |
19:39 |
mchua |
Okay. Remember some of that bandwidth we need to use for things like "nagging inactive maintainers" and "finding contributors to help" and "documenting lots" and all. |
19:39 |
sdziallas |
IRC, heh? let me look at our list again. |
19:40 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Basically, what are the activities that it would pretty much break your heart not to include? Then we can pass those through a "does it work?" basic sanity check, and then look at the maintenance and packing state. |
19:40 |
|
er, packaging. |
19:40 |
sdziallas |
mchua: uh, before I forget, we should probably add another package (csound... and stuff, since otherwise people will complain when they use activities from a.sl.o and sound doesn't work) |
19:40 |
|
mchua: infoslicer? |
19:41 |
|
log? |
19:41 |
|
dunno how popular chat is. |
19:41 |
|
maze? *grin* |
19:42 |
mchua |
Ohhhh, Maze. |
19:42 |
sdziallas |
(playgo, but that's a personal one, so I'll grab that myself form a.sl.o) |
19:42 |
mchua |
laughs |
19:42 |
sdziallas |
(tamtam, because I wasted hours on packaging that sucker) |
19:42 |
|
so the ebook stuff might... not make sense anyway, since I don't know how much read works. |
19:43 |
mchua |
I've been meaning to get my friend Mark to teach me to play more Go. |
19:43 |
sdziallas |
I've had issues with it when I tried, but I'm not sure whether it's entirely broken. |
19:43 |
mchua |
But yeah, ASLO. |
19:43 |
sdziallas |
We could use the PlayGo activity at some point... :) |
19:43 |
mchua |
has never really gotten into using Read, so is probably biased here. |
19:43 |
sdziallas |
heh. nope, it's alright. |
19:43 |
|
(just sayin' that we don't need to whine about an ebook activity if we can't read them out of the box) |
19:43 |
mchua |
nods. |
19:44 |
|
That would also mean a lack of "ZOMG PANIC MUST FIND EBOOKS" rushing for this release. |
19:44 |
|
Which would be lovely to avoid. |
19:44 |
sdziallas |
LOL, yeah ;) |
19:44 |
|
looks at list again. |
19:44 |
|
tries to put them all in one line |
19:44 |
satellit_ |
presence service? |
19:45 |
sdziallas |
mchua: speak. IRC. infoslicer. log. chat (?). maze. tamtam. |
19:45 |
|
mchua: for example log might make sense, since otherwise it'd be just hard to grab the logs. |
19:46 |
mchua |
sdziallas: I like tamtam - though I'm not sure how active the upstream is. I like Maze - I'd like to do a quick sanity check on upstream health, but it seemed solid when I tried it (informally). Same with Speak, perhaps with a bit more testing. And the Help activity may be worth doing some legwork to update and get in there. Log is also a good one to have around. |
19:46 |
|
will be shorter |
19:46 |
sdziallas |
mchua: help is broken. |
19:46 |
mchua |
sdziallas: speak, log, tamtam, maze, maybe-help-if-it-can-be-hammered-into-working-but-not-now. |
19:46 |
sdziallas |
mchua: because it only works with 0.84, heh. :/ |
19:47 |
|
mchua: okay. no chance for infoslicer and irc? the latter upstream is... nice, I hear ;) |
19:47 |
mchua |
Hm. it's an Activity worth maintaining, though, and one of the first I'd probably want to call for help with. |
19:47 |
|
But that's later. |
19:47 |
sdziallas |
yeah... $5 and stuff. |
19:47 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Oh, IRC is poorly maintained by a total slacker who won't be updating it for this release due to lack of time. |
19:47 |
sdziallas |
mchua: but I hear it works, no? ;) |
19:47 |
mchua |
So if you really want to package it and ship it, all right, but don't expect a lot of dev help available from her. :) |
19:48 |
|
sdziallas: It does, on a basic level. I'd want to add that to my smoke test list for the weekend, actually. |
19:48 |
sdziallas |
(it's already packaged) |
19:48 |
|
okay, so I'll just add that. if you smoke test stuff, that's... good :) |
19:48 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: infoslicer? I had not seen a ticket for that one... |
19:48 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Well, also - I'm getting a bit nervous about the size of this list. |
19:48 |
|
sdziallas: some of these can be "please install via ASLO" things as well. |
19:48 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: no no, no tickets... just whether we want to include it ;) |
19:49 |
mchua |
I'd argue that if anyting goes in, it should be (1) maze, for quick demo happiness, (2) log, for debugging, and (3) IRC, for quickly getting help online. |
19:49 |
|
Maybe TamTam as a 4th. |
19:49 |
|
Because it demos very, very well. |
19:49 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: I need to look at the backlog :) |
19:49 |
mchua |
If we can smoketest and verify these all seem sane. |
19:49 |
|
sdziallas: That brings us up to 10, and I would cap there, and put the rest as "hey ASLO is awesome." |
19:49 |
sdziallas |
mchua: I like infoslicer, too, but... let me see. |
19:50 |
mchua |
too, but... ASLO. |
19:50 |
sdziallas |
mchua: 11, even. |
19:50 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Everything we add brings more maintenance load. |
19:50 |
|
11? |
19:50 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: we could brief you ;) |
19:50 |
mchua |
counts |
19:50 |
sdziallas |
mchua: (gobby) |
19:50 |
|
mchua: oh, no speak? yeah, we could kick that. |
19:50 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: if you need some more "maintained" activities, there is alway: TurtleArt, VisualMatch, CardSort, Ruler, Sliderule... |
19:51 |
sdziallas |
mchua: tamtam also gives you four activities in one (which I need to fix first) |
19:51 |
mchua |
sdziallas: oh yeah. 11. I can count. |
19:51 |
walterbender |
mchua: that is already 25% of the way to 20 activities :) |
19:51 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: the first two of them are packaged, the other one are... waiting for me :) |
19:51 |
mchua |
sdziallas: I'm nervous about this list, it's getting big |
19:51 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: and anything Gray Martin in involved in is well maintained... |
19:52 |
|
sdziallas: and unamindu and jim simmons are pretty diligent with theirs too |
19:52 |
mchua |
sdziallas: I know the stuff in here is good, but for most of them I'm not *quite* sure, just 90% confident. |
19:52 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: and alsroot is a machine :) |
19:52 |
sdziallas |
mchua: mhm ;) |
19:52 |
mchua |
And we can have strong pushes towards ASLO. |
19:52 |
|
Actually, we should have a strong list of recommended ASLO programs |
19:52 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: hehe, yeah - thanks for the help! |
19:52 |
|
mchua: yes! you're right. |
19:52 |
mchua |
that we know with good confidence are kickass and will work |
19:52 |
|
to give people the "oh wait ASLO has good stuff, there is more quality to discover!" feeling. |
19:53 |
sdziallas |
mchua: so, from the gobby list, do you want to kick more? |
19:53 |
walterbender |
mchua: if you know with confidence that they are kick ass and will work, why not include them in the first place? |
19:53 |
mchua |
walterbender: Because it's not confidence, it's "reasonably high certainty but I'm not entirely sure because we haven't thoroughly tested them." |
19:53 |
|
And I can handle that for 2 or 3 Activities that ship. |
19:53 |
|
I can't do it for 12. |
19:54 |
walterbender |
mchua: you need to share the load... |
19:54 |
|
mchua: of course you cannot do it yourself!!! |
19:54 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: well, the same goes for packaging... and I haven't been able to share that load, yet. |
19:55 |
|
walterbender: (meaning that I find myself doing a lot - probably too much - of everything right now) |
19:55 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: that is a horse of a different color |
19:56 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: the relationship lies close there, because if an activity is dead upstream, I can't do much as a packager. |
19:56 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: I bet there are some of Jeff Elkner's students who could help you... we just need to ask them... |
19:56 |
mchua |
walterbender: when have you known me to try to do something by myself? ;) |
19:57 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: when you need a stick, just ask me :) |
19:57 |
mchua |
I'm a lazy bum. :) I also try to underpromise and overdeliver. |
19:57 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: hehe :p well, the issue with activity packaging is that it needs to be done *immediately* - like a day or two after another release is out. |
19:57 |
|
mchua: gah. I heard that today already once :) |
19:58 |
mchua |
sdziallas: So, gobby has my list of 6. |
19:58 |
|
sdziallas: I think EToys is a *great* place for us to give a strong, strong call-to-action to not just ASLO, but to the upstream EToys community. |
19:58 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: so give me a list of the activities that are causing you packaging issues and I will use my stick... |
19:58 |
sdziallas |
mchua: so you mean we should have people pull it form ASLO? |
19:58 |
|
walterbender: LOL! |
19:58 |
mchua |
Which we can do more effectively in a "you - go get this awesome thing, and while you're at it check out these places with more resources!" |
19:59 |
|
sdziallas: Yeah, I would propose that, *because*... |
19:59 |
|
Etoys is complex and sophisticated enough that including it without instructions can confuse folks. |
19:59 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: pick randomly one from here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sugar_Activities (I'm semi-joking) |
19:59 |
mchua |
But if we set up a strong driving force to the EToys upstream, they get more participants - not just users - and are able to help give the people who take that extra step have a *really* good first etoys experience. |
19:59 |
walterbender |
mchua: is Etoys not packaged because of questions about the license? It would be a shame not to include it preloaded... |
20:00 |
mchua |
I want to make the list so slim that it's obvious that *not* being included on the SoaS image isn't a slight. |
20:00 |
|
And that people *should* get more stuff from ASLO. It should be impossible to actually teach a class with the stuff preloaded on this stick. |
20:00 |
walterbender |
mchua: I think you need to consider the user experience, not just slighting the developers |
20:00 |
sdziallas |
mchua: LOL! (better not let anybody quote you to Sean on that) |
20:00 |
mchua |
The point is that you need to poke around and customize, explore - because we are *not* in a position where we can deliver and support a preloaded experience. |
20:01 |
walterbender |
mchua: I don't understand your logic |
20:01 |
|
mchua: hopefully the stick will reach people with no internet access... |
20:01 |
mchua |
walterbender: Hopefully, yes. Not for this release, though. |
20:01 |
walterbender |
mchua: it is not production yet, but you are raising the user experience bar... |
20:01 |
mchua |
walterbender: Um... I should probably back up. How much context do you have for what we're trying to do right now? |
20:02 |
walterbender |
mchua: I read the meeting notes from this morning... |
20:02 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: did you fell off your couch? :) |
20:02 |
walterbender |
I didn't fall off my couch, but I have to say, I am in Sean's camp |
20:02 |
sdziallas |
(fall, even. apparently I can't speak English tonight, either) |
20:03 |
walterbender |
I guess I am not tuned in sufficiently to the time tables... |
20:03 |
|
sdziallas: you are feeling F13 deadline pressures? |
20:04 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: well, it's not simply the F13 deadline. |
20:04 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: what else impacts your ability to set your own schedule? |
20:05 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: I'm afraid that a lot of our core modules are broken and that I'll end up having to maintain 30 activity packages, to release-engineer the kickstart file and to do bug hunting and documentation work. |
20:05 |
|
walterbender: so I'm alright with the deadlines. because even if we had unlimited time frames, this stuff simply wouldn't get fixed all of a sudden. |
20:06 |
|
walterbender: I'll get you a bug with a scary example. |
20:06 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: I guess I am confused... a chicken and egg problem? F13 and Sucrose 0.88 need to settle BEFORE you can make the next SoaS release. |
20:06 |
|
and there may be packages in F13 that are not sympathetic to some Activities |
20:07 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1767 |
20:07 |
|
walterbender: write is currently broken. and nobody would have noticed, because write has no owner in trac. |
20:07 |
|
walterbender: (the next SoaS release will happen together with F13) |
20:08 |
|
walterbender: but I'm happy to step back for a minute and listen :) - might make sense to hear what drives you to the other side's camp and how you see this. :) |
20:09 |
mchua |
walterbender: yeah, I'm also curious how you see the situation, because we apparently have a different viewpoint here, and maybe there is stuff I'm missing. |
20:11 |
walterbender |
sdziallas, mchua: I think that we have a bit of a panic behavior going on right now and that we need to slow down and communicate the situation with the community in order to find the help you need. |
20:12 |
|
sdziallas: Write is broken on the current SoaS builds? But not in general... because I use it all the time with the latest Sugar... |
20:12 |
|
so it is probably just a matter of getting the correct pieces into place. |
20:12 |
sdziallas |
walterbender: broken, as in: "the screen is obfuscated, you can't really see what you type" |
20:12 |
|
(the latest snapshots, yup) |
20:12 |
|
mhm. |
20:13 |
mchua |
walterbender: We were actually trying to get a quick draft of the kickstart and the resulting iso out this (EST) morning so we could run it by the various lists and the rest of the community as the start of a conversation. |
20:13 |
walterbender |
sdziallas: I'll grab a snapshot and take a look... |
20:13 |
mchua |
walterbender: Initially, I was thinking that the whole "revise .ks, make .iso, email the lists and say "hey, what do you think?" would take... maybe 2 hours, 3 at most." |
20:13 |
walterbender |
it could be a mismatch with either abiword or metacity... |
20:13 |
|
but I doubt it is a problem in Sugar itself. |
20:13 |
mchua |
walterbender: and we were having that convo (logged) in public channels so that folks could see what we were doing. |
20:13 |
walterbender |
Gary is the maintainer of the Sugar side of the problem. |
20:14 |
mchua |
walterbender: but we kept getting (very good) questions on why, and stopping to explain what was up, and so it stretched out into... longer than 3 hours. |
20:14 |
walterbender |
mchua: just because it is public doesn't mean anyone is tuned in :) |
20:15 |
mchua |
walterbender: Right. Hence the intention to quickly make the kickstart, then the iso, then hit the lists and then listen. |
20:15 |
walterbender |
mchua: I don't think it is widely known that you guys are in a bind. |
20:15 |
mchua |
walterbender: Looking back on this morning, we should have said "just wait 2 hours and let us make the kickstart and explain what we're trying out, then we'll talk." |
20:15 |
|
walterbender: I agree - it isn't, it should be, that is a problem, and we need to be better in the future about communicating those deadlines. |
20:16 |
walterbender |
mchua: OK. I'll get out of your hair (and try to look into the Write situation tonight) |
20:16 |
mchua |
walterbender: Doesn't change the beta freeze date being Tuesday though. :) |
20:16 |
walterbender |
needs to make dinner... |
20:16 |
mchua |
walterbender: Well - before you go, this is something I /am/ concerned about... do you know if we're going to be actively screwing anyone over if this SoaS version ships with very few Activities |
20:17 |
|
(even if there's a big push for a lot of supporting documentation that's kid-and-teacher-tested)? |
20:17 |
walterbender |
mchua: not screwing anyone over, but limiting the amount of testing and feedback you'll get |
20:17 |
mchua |
Do you know of any deployments who actively expect this next version to have a lot of activities, and can't for some reason use the earlier versions, or aslo? |
20:17 |
|
walterbender: Okay. That's what I thought, and what I hoped, and that's all right. |
20:17 |
walterbender |
mchua: I don't think this is a deployment issue. |
20:18 |
mchua |
We'll get testing and feedback on a smaller number of Activities, most likely, but we can drive the testing/feedback process far better for those few. |
20:18 |
walterbender |
mchua: deployments for the most part aren't using SoaS... |
20:18 |
mchua |
walterbender: (I don't want to keep you from cooking dinner - I'll be around for a while if you want to come back later.) |
20:19 |
|
walterbender: Yep, deployments aren't using SoaS. We would like them to eventually. The purpose of SoaS is to make a product for deployment, and each release should get us closer to that. |
20:19 |
|
Ideally, we'd have a large number of high-quality releases with actively engaged upstreams and resources that "pull" users into contact with those upstreams. |
20:19 |
|
er, high-quality activities, I mean. |
20:20 |
|
But we don't have that yet. |
20:20 |
|
And my premise is that: |
20:20 |
walterbender |
but SoaS is a great way to introduce the idea to more people and to expect that after all the pain of making a stick and figuring out how to boot and then finding the wifi drivers because they aren't in F13 and etc to then have to go to ASLO to get activities enough to get the idea is asking too much. we already loose too many people at step 1: downloading SoaS... |
20:20 |
|
mchua: at least half the machines I run SoaS on have no network... |
20:20 |
mchua |
instaed of having the intermediate step of "a large number of mixed-quality activities with mostly not-so-actively-engaged upstreams and nearly no resources that "pull" resources into contact with those upstreams..." |
20:21 |
|
the intermediate step of "a small number of high-quality activities with actively engaged (blah blah blah)" is more likely to get us to the ideal point. |
20:21 |
|
reads up |
20:21 |
walterbender |
mchua: well, again, I don't know what is driving the timetables... I'd personally opt for slowing down and getting the activities qualified. |
20:21 |
|
but if that is not possible... |
20:21 |
mchua |
walterbender: Hm - your case sounds similar to Sean's, a self-contained demo. |
20:22 |
|
walterbender: The timetables are driven by the Fedora release schedule, which we have to adhere to as a Spin. |
20:22 |
|
walterbender: (which brings us a lot of infrastructure advantages - the load of maintaining a build system is off our backs, etc) |
20:22 |
walterbender |
mchua: well, that may be the problem... we perhaps are one release too soon for being a spin... |
20:23 |
|
or a few hands short... |
20:23 |
|
it is too much pressure on sdz |
20:23 |
|
it is a fine goal, but maybe that is where we bend |
20:23 |
mchua |
walterbender: How about this - it sounds like we really do want two separate things, a demo stick (where 'quantity' is the important thing, and mixed quality is more ok because it'll be a more "try it out" thing, or in the hands of an experienced demoer) |
20:24 |
|
walterbender: and a "working towards a solid deployment" stick (where 'quality and upstream engagement' is the important thing, and quantity of activities is small because we only have enough resources to help a few cross that high bar on a short timescale) |
20:24 |
|
walterbender: the second, imo, is the spin |
20:24 |
|
walterbender: the first could quickly be done later - at any time, really - as a quick remix |
20:24 |
|
sdziallas: ^^ ? |
20:24 |
sdziallas |
mchua:I like that idea, actually. it might make sense to promote the Fedora version as "rock-solid deployment but can haz help?" thing and to build a different one using that as a base... just thinking, not sure. |
20:25 |
|
mchua: so yes, I'd say that could be an option - and would even prevent us from "trying to innovate and stablize at the same time" :) |
20:25 |
mchua |
walterbender: That way, you and Sean have the demo sticks you need. And we can market that as... well, it'll basically be SoaS with a bunch of stuff added to it, so it's like "SoaS after you've customized it a lot more" |
20:26 |
|
walterbender: that way also, the additional stuff on the demo stick wouldn't need to be Fedora packages - we could throw in random .xos, change things on a whim, not be tied to the Fedora release schedule for it, etc. |
20:26 |
walterbender |
mchua: well, if we will do the remix, then it really doesn't matter... make the "spin" be as austere as you want... but don't advertize that as what end users should be exploring... |
20:26 |
sdziallas |
mchua: exactly. |
20:26 |
walterbender |
mchua: for that matter, I think we should have two versions of the helper cd available,,, one with selinux=0 |
20:26 |
mchua |
chuckles |
20:27 |
walterbender |
mchua: I am serious. |
20:27 |
mchua |
walterbender: Oh! Why? |
20:27 |
|
is missing context here |
20:34 |
|
Well, either way we should go finish the kickstart file and get this convo out to the lists, albeit some hours belatedly. |
20:54 |
|
(for those watching in the channel, sdziallas and I are just attacking gobby right now and trying to finish *a* kickstart file so we can actually open up the convo) |
21:03 |
satellit__ |
sdziallas:The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins of Fedora 12. from Bernie in soas lists |
21:19 |
bernie |
satellit__: yeah, I cc'd him |
21:19 |
mchua |
bernie: you can make remixes too, you know ;) |
21:21 |
bernie |
mchua: I'm already cooking too many builds for paraguay :-) |
21:22 |
mchua |
The kickstart file is done and building and we'll see what iso we get. |
21:24 |
|
drafting explanation in http://etherpad.com/soas-experiment |
21:24 |
|
sdziallas: ^ |
21:25 |
sdziallas |
mchua: awesome! I'll join you in a sec. |
21:25 |
|
putting the kickstart in git right now |
05:05 |
satellit__ |
sdziallas: IRC will not start on soas-3-20100319. workaround is to delete /usr/share/sugar/activities/IRC/activity directory, then DL from ASLO..then it works |
09:07 |
|
sdziallas: I sent e-mail to soas and you about IRC on new .iso did you see it? |
09:59 |
mchua |
satellit__: Thanks for the heads-up on the ticket - we're a bit swamped right now, but I'm going to be looking at the IRC Activity this weekend. |
09:59 |
|
As part of the "wow, it's been a long time since I was a proper maintainer for that thing" remediation. |
10:00 |
satellit__ |
mchua: a quick fix is not to include it in build (ks) for now till you have time to fix it |
10:01 |
|
it can be downloaded from ASLO and it works |
10:01 |
|
I filed ticket |
10:01 |
mchua |
satellit__: Good to know - and thanks for the ticket! |
10:01 |
|
satellit__: I'm staggering under the load of $dayjob stuff that I'm behind on right now, but when I clear that, I'll be taking a look at the activity. |
10:02 |
|
satellit__: So... just hold tight for a few days. |
10:02 |
satellit__ |
thanks for all of your great work : ) |
10:02 |
|
* lurking to help test : ) |
10:03 |
mchua |
satellit__: I may take you up on that. ;) |
10:03 |
satellit__ |
ok |
10:36 |
christianmarcsch |
hi everyone |
14:20 |
soasUSB-9c2d |
test of edited irc auto channels on soas-3 USB |
15:03 |
satellit__ |
sdzaillas: I have a question. I have built a soas-3-20100319.img of a 2 GB USB that has IRC correction and updates plus an updated TA and analyze. 7 applications. I can upload a compressed file to Tgillard. Everything works should I upload it for testing? |
15:08 |
soasUSB-9c2d |
this is the USB |
15:09 |
|
on an my EeePC900 netbook |
10:06 |
erikos_ |
tomeu: do we start the meeting? |
10:06 |
|
is on fire! |
10:08 |
tomeu |
hi! |
10:08 |
|
hurries |
10:08 |
|
#startmeeting |
10:08 |
|
heh, guess it cannot say who started it? |
10:08 |
|
guess mchua or sdziallas |
10:09 |
sdziallas |
wth? |
10:09 |
|
#endmeeting |
10:09 |
|
this isn't me, it seems. |
10:09 |
|
mchua: hullo! ;) |
10:10 |
mchua |
whoops. |
10:10 |
|
#endmeeting |
09:51 |
sdziallas |
#chair mchua sdziallas |
09:51 |
|
#topic kickstart history storytime |
09:51 |
|
just for reference, we're trying to work out how to keep SoaS sustainable. |
09:51 |
|
so yeah, early days. strawberry. |
09:52 |
|
we shipped the major fructose activities as .rpm files (you couldn't remove those without root permissions because they lived in /usr/share/sugar/activities) and a chunk of other activities as .xo files. |
09:52 |
mchua |
Would that have made it not eligible for spinhood? |
09:52 |
|
the .xos, I mean. |
09:52 |
sdziallas |
for blueberry, we moved to an .xo file-only approach. |
09:53 |
|
mchua: ayup, exactly. |
09:53 |
|
mchua: neither strawberry nor blueberry would have qualified as a spin. |
09:53 |
mchua |
How did the .xo approach work out? |
09:53 |
|
Why are we a spin now? |
09:53 |
sdziallas |
since mirabelle is going to be a Fedora Spin, we're locked down to use .rpms. |
09:54 |
|
mchua: it didn't work too badly. basically, we hadn't to worry about activities. from a release engineering point of view, it was half-ish crap, though. |
09:54 |
|
mchua: maybe this is also a lack of... well, here's the thing: |
09:54 |
|
before we simply pulled the latest activity from a.sl.o (for blueberry). |
09:55 |
|
that worked or didn't. but if something didn't work, it was the activity maintainers fault (at least with quite some certainty). |
09:56 |
|
now since we moved to packaging them (basically since Fedora needs a solution anyways and since bundling libraries is Not Such A Good Idea), we're lacking... ressources. |
09:56 |
|
(oh, and the blueberry release was still worse than the strawberry one, btw) |
09:56 |
mchua |
Worse in what way? |
09:57 |
sdziallas |
people got excited about strawberry. there was nothing to get excited about in blueberry. it sucked. the whole release process was screwed (time-wise). I'm still telling the story of me rebuilding the final images frantically in the middle of the night before I took the plane to Toronto. |
09:58 |
|
I'm having a hard time defining what it was, but yeah... |
09:58 |
mchua |
Ok, yeah, I remember you doing that. :) |
09:59 |
|
And being a spin... is a good idea because... packaging is good? |
09:59 |
sdziallas |
And now I've moved myself into a situation where I've even more to do (expecting that more people jump on board, but that didn't happen) - which means that Mirabelle has a good chance of sucking, too. |
09:59 |
|
Well, I *need* to do it. |
09:59 |
|
It's the only way of satisfying both Fedora's and Sugar's needs at the same time. |
10:00 |
|
And yes, it's a good idea because we've nightly builds (which aren't being thoroughly tested) and the release simply *happens* at one point. |
10:00 |
|
Maybe I'm just afraid of failing. But blueberry was already fail. Time to learn how to do it better. |
10:01 |
|
Maybe I should have listened to Peter and folks. Gah. |
10:01 |
|
What if we moved SoaS out of Fedora again and had simply a Sugar Development Spin? |
10:01 |
|
One that contained only very few activities but something that people could test stuff with? |
10:02 |
|
Sugar on a Stick wouldn't be locked down to a release date and we could still ponder with .xo files as we wanted. |
10:02 |
mchua |
What does being a spin get us? |
10:03 |
|
What I vaguely recall is that we get to use Fedora's build infrastructure (which is nice, we don't have to maintain that) |
10:03 |
sdziallas |
(Mel is in question mode, I like that :) |
10:03 |
mchua |
which means that nightly images magically appear based on the uploaded kickstart file. |
10:03 |
sdziallas |
right. so nightly builds (which we could setup ourselves) |
10:03 |
|
yeah. and we wouldn't need to push the *build* button for the final release. |
10:03 |
|
but I think it'd be actually good to be able to do that. |
10:03 |
mchua |
Aye, but that's extra infrastructure maintenance and being a sysadmin is not nor should it be part of our core capacity. |
10:03 |
|
It'd be good? |
10:03 |
|
How? |
10:04 |
sdziallas |
We wouldn't release crap just no matter what. |
10:04 |
|
And people could still test the nightly builds. |
10:04 |
|
(if SoaS wasn't a spin, but "Sugar Something" was) |
10:04 |
|
but that would mean two solutions. |
10:04 |
|
I was originally pretty happy to have achieved the situation I'm currently in. |
10:05 |
|
Because I felt I'd be doing a good chunk of work more for some time, but would be able to hand that off then. |
10:05 |
|
(which is mostly: *packaging*) |
10:06 |
|
The current situation is quite reasonable from a simple rel-eng POV. |
10:06 |
|
But the more I think, the more I look back at the Strawberry times. |
10:06 |
|
And then I realize that this approach simply didn't scale. |
10:06 |
|
Which is why I made this step. |
10:06 |
|
And then I notice that this thing here doesn't scale either. |
10:06 |
|
Because nobody cares. |
10:07 |
|
But to have people care, to get them involved, they need to be excited. |
10:07 |
|
Mirabelle is not going to have anything exciting. |
10:07 |
|
And then I wonder where we're heading. |
10:07 |
mchua |
thinks sustainability is exciting. |
10:08 |
|
or rather, "watching Sebastian burn out" would be... exciting in a VERY BAD WAY |
10:08 |
|
so, ah, lack of that excitement is... good. And thus exciting. Being able to grow a community to help out with this is exciting. |
10:08 |
sdziallas |
Heh. Living on the edge. |
10:08 |
|
Yes it is. |
10:08 |
|
But it also needs to be exciting for the contributors. |
10:08 |
|
I don't worry much about me being exciting. |
10:08 |
|
s/exciting/excited |
10:08 |
mchua |
Oh, we can give them shiny pictures of happy cute kids. ;) |
10:09 |
sdziallas |
grins. heh ;) |
10:09 |
mchua |
One of the reasons I'm so keen on getting deployments contributing. |
10:09 |
sdziallas |
yeah, right. |
10:09 |
mchua |
Anyway. For this release, SoaS is a spin. |
10:10 |
sdziallas |
ayup. and presumably thereafter, too, unless somebody pays a me a million bucks to screw college. ;) |
10:10 |
mchua |
Because of the necessity of reducing infrastructure maintenance and workload. |
10:10 |
sdziallas |
nods. |
10:11 |
mchua |
Okeydokey. |
10:11 |
|
So we're stuck with a spin for this release. |
10:11 |
|
Which means we have to package everything that goes in SoaS. |
10:11 |
|
Which in some ways is extra work and all, true. |
10:11 |
|
But in other ways is good, because it means all the code will need to pass Fedora guidelines and be relatively clean and modular, and properly licensed. |
10:12 |
|
speculates a bit, is that the right reasoning? |
10:12 |
sdziallas |
this is the reasoning behind it. |
10:12 |
|
if you look at some stuff, it's quite horrible, though, but it works. |
10:12 |
mchua |
Okay. So the issue with the kickstart file now is that a lot of the packages that are listed in it just Don't Work |
10:12 |
|
and the maintainers aren't updating them |
10:12 |
|
and there's no way you can do it all by yourself. |
10:12 |
|
(By Tuesday.) |
10:13 |
|
(which is, for those following along with this log, Beta Freeze for Fedora, which we need to follow since we are a Spin.) |
10:13 |
sdziallas |
(I figured that final freeze is the cut-off date, so we've some time, but having stuff working by the end of the week would be good) |
10:13 |
|
well, the thing is that I should be doing most of the packaging related issues... |
10:13 |
mchua |
#link https://fedoraproject.org/wiki[…]s#Creating_a_Spin |
10:13 |
sdziallas |
...and then NAG everybody about the issues I know nothing about. |
10:14 |
|
however, reducing some kind of load might be good, too. |
10:14 |
mchua |
Ok. So stuff needs to be trimmed so that you can handle the packaging stuff and the nagging-load. |
10:14 |
|
(I'll help with the nagging.) |
10:14 |
sdziallas |
Okay. Thanks :) |
10:14 |
|
, reducing some kind of load might be good, too. |
10:14 |
mchua |
sdziallas: is this the point in time where we go ruthlessly slashing the kickstart file? ;) |
10:15 |
sdziallas |
uh, bad c&p. sorry. |
10:15 |
|
mchua: mhm, possibly. |
10:15 |
mchua |
opens up ze gobby |
10:15 |
sdziallas |
(I'm currently trying to figure out in the background why we won't have a sugar bootscreen for this release, heh.) |
10:15 |
|
does, too. |
10:16 |
|
mchua: you want to go for sunjammer? I can run a sobby session there. |
10:16 |
mchua |
Ok, I have the doc up, it's called fedora-livecd-soas... |
10:16 |
|
...oh, that works too |
10:16 |
sdziallas |
mchua: or which server should I connect to? |
10:17 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Sure, just tell me what to connect to when it's up |
10:18 |
sdziallas |
mchua: sunjammer.sugarlabs.org |
10:19 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Ok, I have a doc up. |
10:19 |
|
I'm going to work under the assumption that we both have the .ks file locally available to us, so I'm going to... |
10:20 |
|
(gimme a second to go SLASH SLASH SLASH) |
10:20 |
sdziallas |
(good to add yourself there, yes :) |
10:20 |
|
what is important to know is that @sugar-desktop still contains activities. |
10:20 |
|
namely, all fructose activities. |
10:21 |
mchua |
sighs |
10:21 |
sdziallas |
so we'll either need to do -sugar-write or so or take the base sugar packages and name them directly (which should work) |
10:21 |
|
LOL! |
10:21 |
mchua |
How about that, then? |
10:21 |
|
SLASH AND BURN |
10:21 |
sdziallas |
pulls up comps |
10:21 |
|
lols |
10:22 |
|
alright, I'm pushing the package list in gobby now for you to see. |
10:22 |
mchua |
oh holy god. |
10:22 |
sdziallas |
we can kick all the optionals |
10:22 |
|
they are not getting pulled anyways. |
10:23 |
mchua |
how about lines 18 - 28? |
10:23 |
|
can they go without breaking anything that's left? |
10:23 |
sdziallas |
well, they are the fructose activities. |
10:23 |
mchua |
so? ;) |
10:23 |
sdziallas |
so we should probably just add "sugar" |
10:24 |
|
and remove these. |
10:24 |
mchua |
ta-dah |
10:24 |
|
do we need gdm |
10:24 |
|
? |
10:24 |
sdziallas |
BURN BABY BURN |
10:24 |
|
or some kind of replacement, yes. |
10:25 |
|
we *might* want to be able to login, right? ;) |
10:25 |
mchua |
What for? It boots directly into Sugar, I don't see a GNOME login screen. |
10:25 |
|
is ignorant. |
10:25 |
|
we can't do that in a virtual terminal? |
10:25 |
sdziallas |
yes, but you need something to log the liveuser account automatically in. |
10:25 |
mchua |
Ohh. |
10:25 |
|
Gotcha. |
10:25 |
|
Okay. Is gdm working, is it a pain to maintain in any way? |
10:25 |
sdziallas |
just starting X doesn't work, I hear (because of some policy / security foo things) |
10:25 |
|
I packaged this: http://www.enricozini.org/sw/nodm/ |
10:26 |
|
looks like exactly what we want, but I haven't been able to get it to work. |
10:26 |
mchua |
It's used by... just about everyone else in Fedora, so I would expect it to be well-maintained without our intervention, but I could be wrong. |
10:26 |
|
looks |
10:26 |
|
what's the benefit of that over gdm? |
10:26 |
sdziallas |
it has NO dependencies. |
10:26 |
|
or at least it doesn't pull in $random_bloaty_gnome_crap. |
10:26 |
mchua |
whereas gdm has... right. Gotcha. |
10:26 |
sdziallas |
grins. |
10:26 |
|
but since it's non-working, we'll need to go with gdm for now. |
10:26 |
mchua |
Okay, um... well, yeah, I'll file nodm as an enhancement we want for v4. |
10:27 |
sdziallas |
(and probably put a comment to look at nodm at some point) |
10:27 |
|
ah, awesome! |
10:27 |
mchua |
you gobby, I'll trac |
10:27 |
sdziallas |
deal! |
10:29 |
|
(I'll do a ticket cleaning session in trac at some point this weekend, too) |
10:29 |
mchua |
sdziallas: what do I do for the distribution/version field, and the milestone field? how do I make sure this is a soas bug? |
10:30 |
sdziallas |
mchua: SoaS is the *component* |
10:30 |
|
(this is important - when I clean up the wiki, I'll make sure to put this up highly) |
10:30 |
|
mchua: distro is fedora - at least here |
10:30 |
|
and milestone is currently unspecified |
10:31 |
mchua |
looks |
10:31 |
|
sdziallas: and I should be ccing sdz, right? |
10:31 |
|
or do you automagically get it? |
10:32 |
sdziallas |
you don't need to, because he and mchua automagically get tickets assigned to the component "soas" |
10:32 |
|
:) |
10:33 |
|
mchua: btw, here's what I'm thinking for v3 - something like "Do Your Own SoaS! - we included the base, now it's your turn. EXPLORE! - grab whatever you want from our portal, activities.sugarlabs.org" |
10:33 |
mchua |
Bam. |
10:33 |
|
yep. |
10:33 |
sdziallas |
grins. BAM. :) |
10:34 |
satellit_ |
browse and terminal will be included? |
10:34 |
mchua |
sdziallas: btw, do we know why nodm doesn't work? |
10:34 |
|
sdziallas: actually, nm, I'll put the ticket in and you can put more details later if there's time, it's not for this release |
10:34 |
|
satellit_: Maybe, we haven't gotten to that decision point yet. ;) |
10:35 |
sdziallas |
I think it might not be up2date for Fedora or there's some other strangeness going on, maybe some missing config file. will need to investigate at some point. |
10:35 |
mchua |
Okay, I'll just put in the bug... one sec... |
10:35 |
|
sdziallas: anything else that's needed to start SoaS and run Sugar (with no Activities yet), period? |
10:36 |
sdziallas |
mchua: well... |
10:36 |
satellit_ |
they are needed to go to aslo and edit |
10:36 |
sdziallas |
mchua: gvfs is needed to show external hard drives. |
10:36 |
|
mchua: gnome-power-manager is needed for... guess what? :) power management |
10:37 |
|
and you don't have audio right now, but since we don't have any activities, that's alright. |
10:37 |
mchua |
#link http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1849 |
10:37 |
|
for the record |
10:38 |
sdziallas |
mchua: you rock! |
10:38 |
mchua |
satellit_: Yep, and those are both good arguments for adding them back in later, but we haven't gotten to that part yet. |
10:38 |
|
satellit_: Right now, we're trying to start with the bare bones of "what will make Sugar work at all?" |
10:38 |
satellit_ |
ok anaconda (for liveinst)? |
10:39 |
mchua |
sdziallas: I'm noticing we're using lots of GNOME stuff here, is that where we want to end up? |
10:39 |
|
has nothing against GNOME, just likes using slimmer things if available |
10:39 |
|
(...says the person who runs KDE) |
10:39 |
sdziallas |
mchua: here? you mean when talking gvfs and power-manager? |
10:39 |
|
mchua: (right now) :) |
10:39 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Yeah, g(anything) |
10:40 |
sdziallas |
mchua: well, that's probably because we're close to gnome... so I guess we'll need to live with that. |
10:40 |
|
mchua: I recall tomeu advocating for these two packages. |
10:40 |
mchua |
satellit_: hold on a bit - write up a list of packages you'd like considered in the background, and when we're done with this first pass through "what do we need to make Sugar work at all?" then we can take a look at yours, to see if we're missing anything. |
10:40 |
tomeu |
yeah, rewriting those wheels doesn't look like a good idea to me |
10:40 |
mchua |
satellit_: (we're doing a non-Activities pass first, and then an Activities pass.) |
10:41 |
|
tomeu: Agreed. |
10:41 |
|
sdziallas: Okay, they're in, where do they go? |
10:41 |
sdziallas |
tomeu: I'm trying to have less on my plate, heh :) rewriting gvfs doesn't sound like... a good idea, agreed. |
10:41 |
|
mchua: I'd put them into system, maybe with an explanation why we want them? |
10:41 |
|
mchua: (I like that you added that for gdm, too) |
10:41 |
mchua |
and by doing this I get to learn about kickstart files yay! |
10:42 |
sdziallas |
hehe :) |
10:42 |
mchua |
sdziallas: what else is needed to run Sugar? |
10:42 |
|
Is that it? |
10:42 |
sdziallas |
I think that's it. |
10:43 |
mchua |
looks at old ks just in case |
10:43 |
|
satellit_: Okeydokey, what's your list? |
10:43 |
sdziallas |
Because the rest gets pulled in through dependencies. |
10:43 |
mchua |
satellit_: (non-Activities first) |
10:43 |
sdziallas |
(as, installing sugar pulls $good_chunk_of_stuff) |
10:43 |
satellit_ |
mucha: liveusb-creator, gedit, wget, yum, gvfs |
10:43 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Woo boy. Okay. |
10:43 |
|
Ah, package management. |
10:44 |
|
looks at time |
10:44 |
|
sdziallas: shall we move to Activities and try to wrap before the SLOBs meeting? |
10:44 |
satellit_ |
plus browse and terminal |
10:44 |
sdziallas |
mchua: sounds good to me. |
10:44 |
mchua |
satellit_: (it's mchua, btw - my screen won't flash for 'mucha' ;) |
10:45 |
|
satellit_: ok - rationale for each? we can take them one by one. |
10:45 |
satellit_ |
mchua: sorry : / |
10:45 |
|
gvfs for disk access |
10:45 |
mchua |
satellit_: np :) |
10:46 |
satellit_ |
terminal for editing and access to yum |
10:46 |
mchua |
satellit_: we have gvfs already, so that's set. |
10:46 |
|
satellit_: good to have that confirmation. |
10:46 |
satellit_ |
wget for uploading |
10:46 |
|
gedit for easier editing than vi |
10:46 |
mchua |
satellit_: actually, the terminal thing brings up a good point... do we need the terminal *activity* or can the current things in the kickstart file give us a VT? |
10:46 |
|
sdziallas: ^? |
10:47 |
satellit_ |
liveusb-creator which can be "sugarixed" as an applicaion in sugar |
10:47 |
mchua |
satellit_: That would be nice, but it's not necessary to *run* Sugar |
10:47 |
|
I'd think of that as an enhancement for later if we have bandwidth to maintain more. |
10:47 |
|
Right now we're going for *super* minimalist. |
10:47 |
sdziallas |
mchua: you could press alt + Fx and do stuff there, afaics. |
10:47 |
satellit_ |
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/C[…]e_liveusb-creator |
10:48 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Ok, so we don't really need any other terminal stuff. |
10:48 |
|
sdziallas: does the image already come with yum? Because if it does, that solves just about everything else |
10:48 |
|
sdziallas: people can install their own stuff, and we're not on the hook for supporting it |
10:48 |
sdziallas |
mchua: we're including a base kickstart file - and need to do that - so that you get a good chunk of packages directly. |
10:49 |
mchua |
satellit_: A sugarized liveusb creator - and gedit - and so forth - would be nice to have, but that's exactly it; they would be "nice to have," not "nothing will work if we do not have them." |
10:49 |
sdziallas |
(such as yum, which comes in one of these groups we pull) |
10:49 |
|
@base-x |
10:49 |
|
@base |
10:49 |
|
@core |
10:49 |
|
@hardware-support |
10:49 |
|
@fonts |
10:49 |
|
@input-methods |
10:49 |
|
kernel |
10:49 |
|
memtest86+ |
10:49 |
mchua |
satellit_: So I'm going to say we should pass on them for this round, because they aren't stricly necessary - and then perhaps provide instructions for how people can install it themselves, for this version. |
10:49 |
satellit_ |
how do I access yum without terminal? |
10:50 |
mchua |
satellit_: if maintainers step up to make sure those things work for future versions, great! Then those can be added to the v4 kickstart. |
10:50 |
|
notes we should probably set criteria for inclusion in soas |
10:50 |
|
#note We need to set inclusion criteria for SoaS for v4 and beyond. |
10:50 |
sdziallas |
that sounds like a good plan! |
10:50 |
mchua |
satellit_: Virtual terminals. if you're running Linux right now, press Ctrl+F5 |
10:51 |
satellit_ |
ok |
10:51 |
mchua |
satellit_: (or Ctrl-F(anynumber)) |
10:51 |
|
satellit_: (Ctrl-F1 will usually get you back to GNOME or KDE or whatever wm you're using) |
10:51 |
|
...gee, I hope he read the "how to get back" directions before he... went off to virtual terminals. |
10:51 |
satellit_ |
in soas...how |
10:51 |
mchua |
oh, good. :) |
10:52 |
|
satellit_: Same thing. Ctrl-F(key). |
10:52 |
|
This is standard stuff on Linux systems. |
10:52 |
satellit_ |
thanks...will test later on ubuntu netbook here |
10:52 |
mchua |
satellit_: Whoops. It may be Ctrl+Alt+F(number). |
10:53 |
|
...yep, Ctrl+Alt+F(number). Sorry about that, I mix up my keyboard shortcuts sometimes. |
10:53 |
satellit_ |
: ) |
10:53 |
mchua |
satellit_: it just takes a moment, you could easily check it out now. |
10:53 |
|
sdziallas: Anyway, in the interests of time - can we say "yum is already included, people can download whatever else they need from there"? |
10:53 |
sdziallas |
mchua: ayup! |
10:54 |
mchua |
#agreed people can yum install further programs for this release if needed, we should provide instructions on how to do so |
10:54 |
|
foresees fun with publican |
10:54 |
|
forsees? foresees? whatever the right spelling is. |
10:54 |
sdziallas |
YAY YAY YAY :) |
10:54 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Okay, wow, 8 minutes left |
10:54 |
|
sdziallas: ACTIVITIES GO |
10:55 |
sdziallas |
alrighty! |
10:55 |
|
do you just want to head through each or how do we do this best? |
10:56 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Start with 0 and then add them back - what's the 1st Activity you'd add back, the 2nd, and then so on? |
10:56 |
|
sdziallas: actually we could pause here and take up the question again when SLOBs is over. |
10:56 |
sdziallas |
mchua: that would probably give us some time... yeah. |
10:56 |
|
sounds good. |
10:56 |
mchua |
#info where we're leaving off: Activity selection |
10:56 |
|
Aaaand I will take the logs and put them on some wiki page somewhere... |
10:56 |
|
#endmeeting |
10:56 |
sdziallas |
awesome! mchua, thanks :) |
10:57 |
mchua |
...wait, meetbot? |
10:57 |
sdziallas |
mhm. |
10:57 |
|
#endmeeting |
11:56 |
|
#chair mchua sdziallas |
11:56 |
|
#topic kickstart part 2 |
11:56 |
|
here we go! |
11:57 |
mchua |
When we last left our heroes, they were DRASTICALLY SLASHING the SoaS kickstart file to make the mainenance load more sane. |
11:57 |
sdziallas |
so this is going to be the activity part! |
11:57 |
|
nods. |
11:57 |
mchua |
*introductory animation, cheerful trumpet music* |
11:57 |
|
Anyway. |
11:58 |
sdziallas |
:) |
11:58 |
mchua |
sdziallas: do we need to put anything in the "multimedia" or "internet" sections or should we just delete those? |
11:58 |
|
(also, hardware, sounds, and fonts) |
11:58 |
sdziallas |
well, unless we need alpine, internet can go awawy. |
11:59 |
mchua |
why would we need alpine? |
11:59 |
sdziallas |
multimedia might be needed, depending on which activities we add. |
11:59 |
|
to read emails :) |
11:59 |
|
j/k |
11:59 |
|
so multimedia is a little tougher, since some of the activities might actually need or not need stuff from there. |
12:00 |
mchua |
Okay, so we'll leave the section in and if we add Activities that need things we can put them in. |
12:00 |
|
and if the section's empty at the end of this exercise, it goes way. |
12:00 |
sdziallas |
hardware was just there to support more hardware (which would be nice to have, I guess) |
12:00 |
mchua |
er, away. |
12:00 |
sdziallas |
nods, that sounds fair |
12:00 |
mchua |
Mm, yeah, hardware support sounds good... how are those packages to update/maintain? |
12:00 |
sdziallas |
(we could make sound and multimedia go into the same category, though) |
12:01 |
mchua |
are those hardware packages being taken care of by other people for normal-Fedora anyway, and we can piggyback along? |
12:01 |
sdziallas |
well, the b43 thing is maintained by... somebody (so non-sugar), i think Peter was looking into that. |
12:01 |
|
so this is... exactly! the case there. |
12:01 |
|
and the libertas firmware is for the XO, so we shouldn't need to worry there. |
12:01 |
|
nukes sound (and will put that stuff later into multimedia) |
12:02 |
mchua |
sdziallas: your call, I'd say. If you're confident they will take 0 maintenance, more hardware sounds good. |
12:02 |
sdziallas |
so I add the two packages for additional hardware support? |
12:02 |
|
yup. |
12:02 |
|
nothing to worry about, I guess. |
12:03 |
|
next one. fonts. |
12:03 |
|
Walter filed a ticket on that some time ago, asking to include these. |
12:04 |
|
http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1119 |
12:04 |
|
should we simply add them and link this ticket for reference? |
12:04 |
mchua |
looks |
12:04 |
|
sdziallas: as long as $someone_else is maintaining the package, sure. |
12:05 |
sdziallas |
mchua: yup, that's the case. |
12:05 |
mchua |
sdziallas: yay packages that require no work from us! |
12:05 |
|
oaky. |
12:05 |
|
er, okay. |
12:05 |
|
can't type this morning. |
12:05 |
sdziallas |
mchua: mostly, the activities are what cause trouble, I guess |
12:05 |
|
mchua: mhm :) |
12:05 |
|
mchua: uh, actually we need to add the boot screen package, too (can wait, though) |
12:07 |
mchua |
Oh, go for it |
12:07 |
|
I wanted to save Activities for last |
12:09 |
|
sdziallas: lemme know when you've got everything except activities in, I suppose. |
12:09 |
sdziallas |
alright! |
12:09 |
|
well, the rest is... depending on the activities, or negotiable. |
12:12 |
|
(which is like "do we need a flash replacement?" or "a screen recorder?" "or a second installer?" or "a way of duplicating the image?") |
12:12 |
mchua |
Activities, then. |
12:12 |
|
Ah, okay. |
12:12 |
sdziallas |
(if the answer is no to all of them, I think we're GO for activities) |
12:12 |
mchua |
I'd say no to all of them. |
12:12 |
|
and if people want that stuff, *they* can maintain it. |
12:13 |
sdziallas |
heh. |
12:13 |
mchua |
This is "operation: let's be lazy bums." |
12:13 |
sdziallas |
well, it's not like I'm maintaining all of this, but it doesn't make sense to ship stuff that doesn't get used, either. |
12:13 |
mchua |
er, I mean... "in order to ensure the high quality of the software that ships with Sugar on a Stick, we are making strategic decisions to..." |
12:13 |
|
Right. |
12:14 |
sdziallas |
can we turn that operation in a movie at some point? :D |
12:14 |
|
j/k |
12:14 |
|
alright. so. activities. |
12:14 |
SeanDaly |
hi mchua, sdziallas |
12:14 |
sdziallas |
waves to SeanDaly |
12:15 |
mchua |
Hey, SeanDaly. We cancelled the SLOBs meeting. |
12:15 |
|
(about an hour ago) |
12:15 |
|
sdziallas: Yep, Activities. |
12:16 |
SeanDaly |
ah, didn't know, I don't get invites anymore and didn't see a mail |
12:16 |
mchua |
sdziallas: let's start with 0 and then add things in until we're not wincing *too* much anymore. |
12:16 |
|
I'd like to try to stay at 5 or less, but... we'll see. |
12:17 |
sdziallas |
mchua: whoa... heh, okay ;) |
12:17 |
|
mchua: browse is a must, I hear. |
12:17 |
mchua |
Yeah, if we can only ship with one, I would ship with Browse, from a "this makes Sugar functional" point of view. |
12:17 |
|
It's also used to install other Activities, which... es muy importante. |
12:17 |
sdziallas |
nods. it enables you to do a.sl.o... right. |
12:17 |
|
goes adding that. |
12:18 |
mchua |
sdziallas: so we know how much bandwidth we have to maintain other activities... how bad is Browse to package and maintain as a package? |
12:18 |
|
Code-wise, the bugs scare me. It's not an easy activity to develop. |
12:18 |
sdziallas |
mchua: well, browse is orphaned upstream. |
12:18 |
|
mchua: so there are no updates anyways, heh. |
12:19 |
mchua |
sdziallas: dumb question - why not use $another_browser? What's special about Browse? |
12:19 |
|
(I think I know the answer, but humor me) |
12:19 |
satellit__ |
firefox sugarized it is in aslo? |
12:19 |
sdziallas |
mchua: well, if surf (as in: the webkit one) was better integrated with sugar, I'd go for that. but it's pretty dead, too. |
12:20 |
|
mchua: to answer your question about maintaining it: browse is insofar special as the slightest change in xulrunner (in Fedora) gives us pain. but since xulrunner is pretty strongly maintained by the RH folks (except that they failed to care for F12), I think we... can't do much here. |
12:21 |
mchua |
winces slightly to hear about that history, but... well... okay. |
12:21 |
sdziallas |
mchua: basically: if anybody develops and maintains a new activity for browsing the net, I'd be more than happy to go for that instead. |
12:21 |
mchua |
satellit__: Dunno, you could check in ASLO. ;) |
12:21 |
|
satellit__: Firefox is huge and slow compared to Browse, though. So I'd be reluctant to make the swap. The UI also doesn't translate well to smaller screens, in my experience. |
12:22 |
|
sdziallas: Okay, so... should we put Browse in this time, live with it, file a ticket to either find a maintainer or to look for something better for v4? |
12:22 |
sdziallas |
mchua: yup, sounds good! against what will the ticket be filed, though? SoaS? Browse? |
12:22 |
|
mchua: (the sad thing is: our most important activity is orphaned!) |
12:22 |
satellit__ |
it is in aslo....need password to do dl |
12:23 |
sdziallas |
(heh, I think I'm both of us might be blogging about this session, so... heh.) |
12:23 |
mchua |
sdziallas: SoaS, because we need to find "a web-browsing solution" which may or may not be Browse. As part of that ticket we'll have to be poking the Browse folks, but we'll also explore other options. |
12:23 |
sdziallas |
mchua: sounds reasonable! |
12:24 |
mchua |
goes to file that ticket |
12:24 |
sdziallas |
thanks :) |
12:26 |
mchua |
So it's basically no maintenance work from the packaging side this round. |
12:26 |
|
But may be a heavy load on testing and support. |
12:26 |
|
That's okay with me. |
12:26 |
sdziallas |
nods. exactly! |
12:26 |
|
yeah... we should be good for v3 by now. |
12:27 |
mchua |
Okay. If we *just* shipped Browse, would we be totally unsatisfied? |
12:27 |
sdziallas |
Heh. Possibly. |
12:28 |
SeanDaly |
what's the topic? |
12:28 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: sustainability :) |
12:29 |
mchua |
sdziallas: What's the 2nd Activity you'd add? |
12:29 |
SeanDaly |
always a good one :-) |
12:29 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: The idea is to ship a *much* smaller SoaS Activity list - bare minimum, providing instructions on how people can install more. |
12:30 |
|
SeanDaly: That way we have the bandwidth to really test and "support" the small number of core Activities we're putting out. |
12:30 |
|
And people don't expect us to support the rest - and they also get to feel a little more participatory by going out and exploring other Activities to install. |
12:30 |
|
(part of this would be making very, very good docs and guides for many different sorts of audiences on how to do exactly that.) |
12:30 |
|
(welcoming them to the community as explorers, etc.) |
12:30 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: that's a bit of a crazy idea, considering we tell everyone that SoaS has a selection of ready-to-use Activities |
12:31 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: But the truth is that it doesn't, really - a lot of the Activities are broken/unmaintained right now. |
12:31 |
SeanDaly |
No argument there, but that's not the point |
12:31 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: SoaS will still have a selection of ready-to-use Activities, just a smaller one. And all the Activities on it will actually work, work well, and have responsive maintainers. |
12:32 |
SeanDaly |
SoaS serves a vital goal in overcoming the two main barriers Sugar faces: the install barrier and the unfamiliarity barrier |
12:32 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: No argument there either. |
12:33 |
SeanDaly |
It serves an extremely useful purpose to recruit teachers, parents, and contributors |
12:33 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Yep, I agree. |
12:33 |
SeanDaly |
leaving out Activities raises the install barrrier unfortunately |
12:33 |
|
SoaS for a deployment would be a different story |
12:34 |
|
But when I am in front of 100 people like I was 2 days ago at the education roundtable of Solutions Linux, I boot up Sugar and point to Activities and launch a few |
12:35 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Oh, we're not cutting *all* Activities. We'll certainly leave a couple that will make a compelling demo. |
12:35 |
|
SeanDaly: And the instructions for installing more Activities will be so good, first graders can follow them. |
12:35 |
|
SeanDaly: Actually, my plan is to get first graders to write them. ;) |
12:36 |
SeanDaly |
Booting it up with 3 Activities and saying "fihure out by yourselves how to use this unfamiliar interface which may or may not work with your wireless card to get online and donwload and install more Activities" defeats the entire purpose of SoaS |
12:36 |
|
fihure/figure |
12:36 |
|
what possible advantage is there? |
12:37 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Well, let me try to describe what will happen if we *don't* cut the list. |
12:37 |
|
SeanDaly: We have... what, sdziallas, 20 Activities on the list now? Something around there? |
12:37 |
|
SeanDaly: 8 of them simply don't work, as of right nowl |
12:37 |
|
er, right now. |
12:37 |
sdziallas |
mchua: probably something around that, yup. |
12:38 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Nor do they have active maintainers. So they will, in all probability, continue to be broken. |
12:38 |
|
SeanDaly: The remainder aren't necessarily in much better shape. Some are extremely well-maintained (say, TurtleArt), but those are few and far between. |
12:38 |
|
And things we would consider "core activities" - Browse, Write - are among the broken, unmaintained ones. |
12:39 |
SeanDaly |
so 240 Activities in ASLO, and we can't find 20 that work? |
12:39 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: That work well and are actively maintained by responsive developers? Yes, we can't find 20 of those. |
12:40 |
SeanDaly |
the maintenance matters less than whether they work |
12:40 |
tomeu |
also, I don't think we have enough resources to go through those 240 activities and actually see if they work or not |
12:40 |
mchua |
tomeu: +1 |
12:40 |
tomeu |
in the past, we have included activities just because they managed to startup |
12:40 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: The maintenance matters, because we also want them to work tomorrow. |
12:40 |
tomeu |
and later turned out that were useless because of some later error |
12:40 |
SeanDaly |
I mean, 1.4 millions XO-1s in the wild, and most of those Activities don't work? |
12:41 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Yep. |
12:41 |
tomeu |
well, those xo-1s don't care if an activity works in mirabelle |
12:41 |
SeanDaly |
it's news to me that most Activities used by children today are not working, where does this info come from? |
12:42 |
tomeu |
often, we cannot say if an activity "works" because there's no documentation about how the author intended it to work |
12:42 |
sdziallas |
tomeu: right, test cases are something we desperately need, too. |
12:42 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: I think you're assuming that we have (or had, in the past) a sufficient amount of development and QA manpower to do things properly. ;) |
12:42 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: anecdotal experience from reading the bugtracker and the mailing lists |
12:43 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: As the person who used to be responsible for running the OLPC QA community team as half of my $dayjob, and did deployment support as the other half... I can tell you with great confidence that This Is Not The Case. |
12:43 |
SeanDaly |
I'd be surprised if the major Sugar deployments hadn't mentioned to anybody that most Activities are not working |
12:43 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: booting the latest snapshot. knowing that browse and record were broken *for months* without anybody caring about that. (to be continued) |
12:43 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: they aren't using mirabelle |
12:44 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: They're using old, old images that we shipped more than a year ago. |
12:44 |
tomeu |
the problem is not only if something "works", but also in which sugar version it works |
12:44 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: And they do report bugs sometimes (the ones who even know they can report bugs - not all of them do). |
12:44 |
SeanDaly |
tomeu: mchua just confirmed that most Activities in the 1.4m XO-1s are not working, I'm just surprised to hear that |
12:44 |
cjb |
SeanDaly: the main argument is that activities *did* work, and continue to work on XO-1s, but do not work on current SoaS |
12:44 |
|
(as I'm hearing it) |
12:44 |
tomeu |
cjb: ++ |
12:45 |
SeanDaly |
I'm confused at this point |
12:45 |
|
cjb: but put like that I'm less confused |
12:45 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: also, it's not only if an activity works on a sugar version or not, we need to take into account different versions of the same activity |
12:45 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: the set of deployments we care about Activities working on SoaS for is "the set of deployments actually using SoaS" |
12:45 |
|
SeanDaly: which is extremely small at this point, afaict |
12:45 |
SeanDaly |
This seems to be a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater |
12:46 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: the N-million kids using XO-1's are not part of our userbase for SoaS. |
12:46 |
|
SeanDaly: How so? |
12:46 |
SeanDaly |
As I say there's a difference between SoaS for lowering barriers and SoaS for deployments |
12:46 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Which one would you say we are working on now? |
12:47 |
|
(I would say the latter.) |
12:47 |
SeanDaly |
SoaS fulfills a vital role for demoing Sugar, allowing teachers and parents to get past the two biggest hurdles |
12:47 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Ok - SoaS as demo tool vs SoaS as deployment tool are different uses, I agree with that. |
12:47 |
tomeu |
suggestion: make a call for testing activities for inclusion into mirabelle |
12:47 |
sdziallas |
mchua: I believe that with the position statement I issued for Blueberry (and I hear most people agreed with), we moved more towards the latter point. |
12:47 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: The intent of demoing, though, is that we hope people will eventually deploy SoaS, right? |
12:48 |
SeanDaly |
SoaS without Activities may be a good base for a pilot deployment version, but will fail in its role for demoing Sugar |
12:48 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: so what I would do, if I were to stand in front of 100 people, is to have my SoaS image with minimal Activity set, and go to ASLO and load it up myself. |
12:48 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: the root of the problem is that if we want something done, we need to find someone who will do it |
12:48 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Then, when I gave my demo, I would say "I installed these additional Activities from ASLO - here's how I did it. Isn't ASLO awesome?" |
12:49 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: and every nongeek teacher there will think "too complicated" |
12:49 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: until now, we have been trying to do more and more without worrying enough about who will do it, and this lowers quality and stresses people like sdziallas |
12:49 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: And right now, I think that's fine. |
12:49 |
SeanDaly |
tomeu: not just sdziallas :D |
12:49 |
tomeu |
well, in the soas case, most of the pressure has been on him |
12:49 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: We don't have bandwidth for support. |
12:49 |
satellit__ |
could we have a script to install sets of activities from aslo |
12:49 |
mchua |
satellit__: That's one possible solution that may be worth exploring. |
12:50 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: I showed ASLO at Solutions Linux too |
12:50 |
mchua |
satellit__: It still makes the assumption that we start with a very small set of Activities and let other people figure out what else *they* want to add and worry about themselves. :) |
12:50 |
satellit__ |
like fedora net install preset activity sets |
12:50 |
SeanDaly |
but when I handed out SD cards, I was always asked if "content" was present or if had to be added, and teachers are invariably happier to find out that they don't need to do anything complicated |
12:51 |
|
For example, I installed Fedora from DVD on 2 netbooks and getting Sugar to work on them has been difficult |
12:52 |
|
and also disorienting, since there are no Activities in the base install; and no indication that ASLO exists |
12:52 |
mchua |
satellit__: A script like that would be outside the scope of SoaS itself, but it might make a nice thing to make as a tool to act *on* the finished SoaS image (though I'm not sure how easy/possible it is, tbh; it may be a simple 'yum install activities' bash script, or it might be ubercomplicated.) |
12:52 |
|
satellit__: in other words, "if you want to make a script that takes the SoaS image and does stuff to it to add more Activities, that's great, but that script itself isn't part of SoaS." |
12:53 |
SeanDaly |
We've been dealing for some time with our limited resources issues |
12:53 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: I don't disagree with your assessments - I just think that we do not have the capacity to support teachers who can't figure out a lot of this stuff, at this point. |
12:53 |
|
As a project - as SoaS. |
12:54 |
|
Individual deployment supported by individual people can do that. |
12:54 |
satellit__ |
could the script be on a startup menu plus install to hard disk (usb) like trisquel and fedora |
12:54 |
SeanDaly |
If we have that many orphaned Activities, perjaps we need to raise priority of recruitment |
12:54 |
mchua |
For instance, that's why I've got the CFS SoaS deployment - because I can guarantee that *I* (Mel) will help that classroom. |
12:54 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: Teachers need to know Sugar exists |
12:54 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: We do need to raise the priority of recruitment - but that's going to help us make a more full-featured SoaS later. |
12:54 |
|
SeanDaly: Right now, we need to slim down many things because the capacity we have to make things well *now* is small. |
12:55 |
|
SeanDaly: I'd rather do a small, high-quality release than a large crappy one. I want to have a reputation for being Extremely Good. |
12:55 |
|
SeanDaly: Teachers need to know Sugar exists, yes. And when they discover Sugar, I'd like them to discover a great, working product. |
12:55 |
SeanDaly |
Well, hearing that most Activities in ASLO don't work seems to me to be a critical situation |
12:56 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Right now, if they don't know about Sugar, they have no expectations about what it does - so we set expectations for the few things we know we can do well, and then as we gain the capacity to do more things well, we go "and now we have more things!" and celebrate that. |
12:56 |
|
SeanDaly: It absolutely is a critical situation. |
12:56 |
tomeu |
a critical situation is that people think that SLs does things by itself, without needing investment |
12:56 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: a solid bulletproof Sugar would spread very quickly, by word of mouth. But it seems to me we can't have a solid bulletproof Sugar with new versions every six months, unless I'm missing something? |
12:57 |
tomeu |
this has drained the energy of the people who managed what we have today, without giving us a way forward |
12:57 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: With our current manpower for SoaS, we can only have a *very small* solid bulletproof SoaS every 6 months. |
12:57 |
sdziallas |
tomeu: +1. |
12:57 |
mchua |
tomeu: +1 |
12:57 |
tomeu |
we have shown that we are capable of doing stuff, now we may need to switch to show how other people can make it possible that we make more stuff |
12:58 |
SeanDaly |
The recruitment problem could be partly solved with funding |
12:58 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: That's actually the goal - it's why sdziallas made SoaS a Fedora Spin this time around, it's why we're slimming down the Activities list for SoaS right now... we *want* solid bulletproof Sugar. |
12:58 |
|
SeanDaly: But we don't have funding now. |
12:58 |
|
SeanDaly: The thing is, beta freeze is *Tuesday.* |
12:58 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: but not just money, the money should be coming from those who actually use and need sugar |
12:58 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: So our problem right now is "okay, between now and Tuesday, what's going to work - and work well?" |
12:58 |
tomeu |
otherwise we won't invest it wisely |
12:58 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: without Activities, there's no point for SoaS |
12:59 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: There'll still be Activities, just not 20 of them. |
12:59 |
SeanDaly |
As I say, no point |
12:59 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: We're going through the list here in public precisely so that people can help us prioritize which Activities we need to spend our time on shipping. |
13:00 |
tomeu |
sees a big point in what mchua and sdziallas are doing |
13:00 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Criteria include things like "impact on education," "demoability," "effort needed to package and maintain the package," and "state of bugs/ease of development." |
13:00 |
SeanDaly |
might be better to deal with this on-list, it's an important topic (unless I missed the mail, I have had connectivity issues) |
13:00 |
tomeu |
and I'm sure deployers like simon and children like his class do as well |
13:00 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: It's going to be hitting the list as soon as we're done with the first cut of the kickstart file. |
13:01 |
|
SeanDaly: Freeze is Tuesday; between now and then, there are 4 daily builds. |
13:01 |
SeanDaly |
I don't know what a kickstart file is, I'm sorry |
13:01 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: We just need to get a first small working version up, and then tell people the process for other things being added to it. |
13:01 |
|
SeanDaly: Whoops, sorry. Geek-brain slip. :) |
13:01 |
SeanDaly |
mchua; that's fine for deployments, but fails as a Sugar demo |
13:02 |
|
SoaS is the central pillar of our marketing because it overcomes the two greatest barriers Sugar faces: installation and unfamiliarity |
13:02 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: You can think of the kickstart file as the list of Activities that will ship in SoaS. It's in a special format so that when you run a script on a kickstart file, it generates an .iso. |
13:02 |
|
sdziallas: (I think. Correct me if I'm wrong.) |
13:02 |
sdziallas |
mchua: that's a good description, I think. |
13:03 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: If we have no solid product, though, we have nothing to market. |
13:03 |
|
SeanDaly: We need to market what we do have - what we can produce - which is this small thing that works well. |
13:03 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: no, that's not correct |
13:03 |
mchua |
willing to be corrected - I'm an engineer, not a marketer, though I've been trying to learn the latter lately. :) |
13:04 |
SeanDaly |
although a bulletproof reliable product would make marketing extremely simple - think Google, which never had to advertise for its first 10 years in business, |
13:04 |
|
we can't say "stop spreading the word about Sugar, it's not ready" |
13:05 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: oh, no, I wouldn't want to say that. |
13:05 |
|
SeanDaly: I'd want to say "spread the word about Sugar - here's what we've got right now, and you can help us build the rest and make it even better." |
13:05 |
SeanDaly |
Everyone who evaluates Sugar - journalists, ed tech buyers, the EU contacts for example - everyone knows Sugar is not ready |
13:06 |
|
What they want is to see the signs of how it is developing and improving |
13:06 |
|
But, my concern is not with them |
13:06 |
|
it is with the 7 million or so primary school teachers in the world |
13:06 |
|
We need to inform them that there is an alternative |
13:07 |
mchua |
There's an alternative, and it's not ready for most of them yet. |
13:07 |
|
They can help make it more ready for them. |
13:07 |
SeanDaly |
OLPC has been thoroughly slagged in the press these past couple of years, for several reasons, |
13:07 |
tomeu |
is confused about the subject of the discussion |
13:08 |
SeanDaly |
but one of the main ones is: journalists couldn't get their hands on one |
13:08 |
mchua |
Hey, rkabir! |
13:08 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: I think everybody in this channel wants sugar and soas be wonderful products and cater all the educative needs of teachers and students |
13:08 |
SeanDaly |
tomeu: SoaS is fulfilling two roles, and if Activities are absent from it, it will not work in one of those roles |
13:08 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: but: 1. we cannot do more than what we can do, 2. we need to think about expanding our capacity |
13:09 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: I think we're drifting from the original purpose of this conversation, which was taking a hard look at the engineering reqs for SoaS for this release cycle (with the upcoming Tuesday beta freeze) and being realistic about what we can and can't do well. |
13:09 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: I suggested before making a call for people testing activities for inclusion in the next release |
13:09 |
|
SeanDaly: or who do you expect to do that work? |
13:09 |
SeanDaly |
tomeu: yes, which is why I said earlier we should raise priority of recruitment and funding if situation that bad |
13:10 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: That's a great medium-term solution, and I'd love to do that. And in the short term - between now and Tuesday - we have to be realistic about our engineering capabilities. |
13:10 |
|
On that note... sdziallas, what's the 2nd Activity you'd add back in? ;) |
13:10 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: so, as I said before, I think first step is stop giving that image of we being able to do much more than what we can really do |
13:10 |
SeanDaly |
tomeu: we've made that call before (cf. press releases) without much success, we need to try another way |
13:11 |
|
tomeu: I'm not aware of that image... |
13:11 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: I'm pretty certain there is |
13:11 |
sdziallas |
mchua: turtleart? physics? not sure. |
13:11 |
mchua |
sdziallas: wait, over Record and Write? |
13:11 |
|
pulls up activity list |
13:11 |
sdziallas |
mchua: write is broken. |
13:11 |
mchua |
realizes that Record and Write are broken, but yeah :) |
13:11 |
sdziallas |
mchua: record... well, works half-ish, could go in. |
13:11 |
SeanDaly |
Look, if situation is this critical we can skip the launch for Mirabelle |
13:12 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: You're welcome (actually, it would be *great*) to chime in on the Activity selection... which ones demo best? |
13:12 |
|
SeanDaly: I think we can redirect a lot of the publicity push for Mirabelle for users/consumers |
13:12 |
SeanDaly |
What we should do is number it v2.5 and position it as strengthening stability for our deployments |
13:13 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: but we need to "release early, release often" to enable developers to help out - it's part of what we have to do in order to increase our capacity, and make recruiting possible. |
13:13 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: as I say, if the situation is this critical we shouldn't do any publicity |
13:13 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: to users, no. |
13:13 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: yes, as I say we need to raise priority of recruiting/funding |
13:13 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: To developers who might help out, we need to do a *lot* of recruiting. |
13:13 |
|
SeanDaly: so maybe that's not called 'publicity,' but somehow we have to reach those folks. :) |
13:14 |
satellit__ |
fix spin v3 then when it works do publicity |
13:14 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: by "users" I guess you mean my 7 million teachers? :D |
13:14 |
mchua |
sdziallas: ok, I'm looking at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sugar_Activities |
13:14 |
|
SeanDaly: Yeah... market less to teachers and more to techies who can help make it ready to market to teachers |
13:14 |
sdziallas |
mchua: I'm there, too (and have the rest of the activities in the old kickstart file) |
13:14 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Or to techies who can then opt to support the teachers near them, kinda like what erikos and I are doing now |
13:14 |
SeanDaly |
satellit__: betterr to renumber v2.5 maintenance release and save v3 number for media launch in the fall (or whenever ready) |
13:15 |
satellit__ |
yes i guess I agree...sadly |
13:16 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: well, a diffferent approach could be to recruit geeks to pilot in schools (previously we had been thinking "geeky teachers") |
13:16 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Hold on a moment, I want to make sure we're on the same page here... |
13:16 |
|
here's what I have in my brain, correct me if I'm wrong. |
13:16 |
satellit__ |
I still like the minimal idea....with scripts to install on startup menu |
13:16 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: The facts of the situation are that we have a looming deadline (Tuesday beta freeze) before which to get engineering done, and few resources, so we need to (temporarily) scale back the scope of our engineering efforts. |
13:17 |
SeanDaly |
satellit__: it's a good approach... for a school admin setting up a deployment |
13:17 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: which is what sdziallas and I are trying to do right now, in the form of reducing the list of activities that ship with SoaS by default. |
13:17 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: I have no objection (I mean, we can't spin gold from flax), but dong so make SoaS unusable in its demo role |
13:18 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: So there will be an image created that is 100% solid working SoaS - but very minimal SoaS, with few Activities, because we will be spending our efforts on making sure those Activities are working really well. |
13:18 |
|
SeanDaly: Right, getting to that. |
13:18 |
satellit__ |
strawberry works for demo? |
13:18 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: This image is a lot less full-featured than the previous one - it has fewer Activities, and as SeanDaly pointed out, doesn't demo as well because... well, there's less stuff to demo. |
13:19 |
|
SeanDaly: And so it's less appealing to a large group of teachers - the kind who want and need the extra leg-up of having Activities ready-to-go on the stick they're trying out. |
13:19 |
|
Which is fine, 'cause teachers have a lot of other things to do. :) |
13:20 |
|
SeanDaly: And so the question now is - okay, we're making this slimmer image... what do we call it and how do we market it when it's released (in May, because we're tied to the Fedora 13 release date, as a spin)? |
13:20 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: we don't market it |
13:20 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: I agree. |
13:20 |
|
SeanDaly: I think we use that release as a recruitment release, rather than a marketing release. |
13:21 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: we use it in a recruitment campaign, and the less said in our PR the better |
13:21 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: +1. |
13:21 |
|
SeanDaly: Okay, so I don't think we actually disagree on anything. :) |
13:21 |
|
SeanDaly: (wait, isn't recruitment sort of a form of marketing, though?) |
13:21 |
|
SeanDaly: (marketing the experience of participation, anyway.,) |
13:22 |
SeanDaly |
Well, it's a disappointment not to keep press release rhythm going, but I have other PR in the pipeline |
13:22 |
|
Marketing is what I call reaching 7 million teachers, and recruitment is what I call reaching 1000 developers |
13:23 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Yeah... well, between May and the start of the school year, there's some time to fix stuff. I'm not sure what'll happen there, but hopefully we'll have enough contribution from that recruitment push to give you something really good to market for v4. |
13:23 |
SeanDaly |
naturally, there's a communications strategy in recruitment :-) |
13:23 |
satellit__ |
I think strawberry is great for demo's most applications work. use v2.5 for recruitment for developers |
13:23 |
SeanDaly |
Shouldn't be v4, that will confuse people. We should renumber v2.5 and save v3 for the fall when hopefully it will be ready |
13:24 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Yeah, I think we're going to need a lot of help with that when the time comes. :) |
13:24 |
SeanDaly |
satellit__: Ii still use Strawberry for demoing |
13:24 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: I don't think recruitment is just reaching developers, there's much more to it. also, we don't only need to recruit, we need to manage them |
13:24 |
satellit__ |
: ) |
13:24 |
tomeu |
iow: we need a community manager |
13:24 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Actually, can we talk about the version numbers for a bit? |
13:24 |
SeanDaly |
tomeu: no disagreement from me, but mchua was talking marketing |
13:25 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: As a (former) developer, calling this 2.5 is confusing and goes against all the FOSS dev conventions that I know. |
13:25 |
SeanDaly |
most FLOSS projects think marketing is recruitment, and miss opportunities for breakout |
13:25 |
tomeu |
SeanDaly: I just say this because if we reach those developers but aren't in place to welcome there, we'll miss the chance |
13:25 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Maybe what we need is a way to mark releases as "for teachers" - the same way, for example, Ubuntu marks some releases as LTS. |
13:25 |
satellit__ |
if use 2.5 then have 1 year releases. better for school periods? |
13:26 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: exactly the opposite: I argued for the renumbering to v1, v2, v3 precisely because the v0.84 numbering was incomprehensible to nongeeks teachers |
13:26 |
mchua |
tomeu: Yep. So any outreach/contribution campaign has a dependency of making sure we can take in the influx of whatever that campaign will give us. |
13:27 |
SeanDaly |
v3 is commonly considered a version that is stable and has the bugs out |
13:27 |
|
it would be a big mistake for us to use v3 on a maintenance release |
13:27 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Hm, okay. I thought that's what the names (strawberry, blueberry, mirabelle) were for - so that there would be a series of user-facing names independent of the engineering-development numbers. |
13:27 |
satellit__ |
v3 RC? |
13:27 |
tomeu |
mchua: and perhaps there's even more to that, we need to change our community's culture to be one where it's more clear where more work is needed, how that work can be contributed, and what will happen if nobody steps up |
13:28 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: from my pov, as an engineer, I need some way of marking when large changes in the product happen - for technical compatibility and maintenance reasons. |
13:28 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: if you look at the PR, we have always associated the ice cream flavor with v1, v2 |
13:28 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: and in my mind, what we're doing now is a *huge* change, relatively speaking |
13:28 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: removing nearly all Activities is a pretty major change |
13:28 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: so I'm going "oh hey, this is something different altogether - this is a new major version, engineering-wise." |
13:29 |
|
SeanDaly: Maybe the engineering numbering needs to be separate from the marketing numbering, but I'm not sure how we can separate those two counters. |
13:29 |
|
tomeu: Yep, culture of contribution. |
13:29 |
SeanDaly |
then best to start an Nth engineering numbering system |
13:29 |
|
v1, v2, v3 have always been "marketing" version numbers |
13:30 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: in the engineering numbering system, the-image-that-will-come-out-in-May will, I think, be the-third-version... |
13:30 |
tomeu |
should restart reading jono's book |
13:30 |
SeanDaly |
This was discussed in depth last May before Strawberry release |
13:30 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: what can we use for counting engineering releases that won't collide with the marketing version numbers? |
13:30 |
|
sdziallas: thoughts? |
13:30 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: not for teachers, so should be v2.5 |
13:30 |
|
mchua: you could use SoaS F13/v0.88 |
13:30 |
sdziallas |
(I've been following this convo) |
13:31 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: well, if we were using the same numbering system for marketing and engineering, sure. But we're not, because engineers need a different numbering system than... oh, hey. SoaS F13/v0.88 would work for me. |
13:31 |
sdziallas |
I'm leaning towards arguing that it's still the third release. |
13:31 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Why's that? |
13:31 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: I argued for v1 instead of "F11/v0.84", and you saw the press coverage? |
13:32 |
sdziallas |
mchua: Because... it is. Whether it has a different audience from a PR point of view doesn't decrease the value of the release. |
13:32 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Refresh my memory? |
13:32 |
satellit__ |
why cannot it be labeled V3 release candidate? |
13:34 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas: journalists who reviewed v2 Blueberry and in the fall hear about v4 Cloudberry will say: "Whoa! I missed a version!" |
13:34 |
mchua |
satellit__: Because a release candidate is "the final release, we think, except it hasn't been fully tested yet" - implying that the feature set in the release candidate is the feature set that will be marketed to users. |
13:34 |
SeanDaly |
But they didn't, because this version is not intended for demoing Sugar |
13:34 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: well, not necessarily. |
13:34 |
|
SeanDaly: here's the thing: |
13:34 |
satellit__ |
ok I thought is was for debugging and testing |
13:34 |
mchua |
satellit__: In this case, we have a very tiny feature set, and we don't *want* to market that to users, we want to wait another cycle to have more features in a release we *do* want to market to users. |
13:34 |
|
satellit__: at least that's my understanding - SeanDaly can probably correct me if I'm wrong. :) |
13:34 |
sdziallas |
(gah. gotta find a quote, hang on.) |
13:35 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas: surely you're aware that most tech writers review a "v3" more in depth than first two versions? |
13:35 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: "Do Your Own SoaS! - we included the base, now it's your turn. EXPLORE! - grab whatever you want from our portal, activities.sugarlabs.org" |
13:35 |
|
SeanDaly: together with a "we're calling for more developers" |
13:35 |
|
SeanDaly: plus a "we're collaborating with Fedora to make v4 more awesome - v3 is already rock-stable" |
13:35 |
|
...call should make a pretty decent marketing call from my point of view. |
13:36 |
mchua |
I do think there's a way to calibrate expectations for this as a release such that reviews based on those expectations will be good. |
13:36 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas:as I say i agree we can work on recruiting developers, but a SoaS without Activities will fail as a demo for teachers |
13:36 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: we are *not* removing all activities. |
13:36 |
|
SeanDaly: and you were talking about journalists a second ago. |
13:36 |
|
I'd like to tackle these issues step by step. |
13:37 |
mchua |
listens |
13:37 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas: it's just not realistic to expect someone who has never seen the interface and doesn't know what a wifi driver is to connect to ASLO and install Activities |
13:37 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: that is why there will be awesome documentations. |
13:38 |
|
SeanDaly: such as included instructions in the journal and a redesigned wiki page. |
13:38 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas: it's a major change from previous launched versions |
13:38 |
|
That's why we shouldn't do any media campaign, just outreach to developers |
13:38 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: I'm not sure I understand that point. |
13:38 |
SeanDaly |
but v1, v2, v3 numbering should be tied to media launches |
13:39 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: Change is good. And as long as we can justify why we're doing this - and we certainly can - it'll be alright. |
13:39 |
satellit__ |
we need an accompanying DVD .iso to DL with the instructions and demos |
13:39 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: If we explain that v3 introduces a cooperation with Fedora, making everything more stable, I don't see why we shouldn't do that. |
13:39 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas: it will be fine, just not for media launch and teachers, that can wait until the fall |
13:39 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: such as we did with Strawberry. |
13:40 |
|
SeanDaly: I still don't understand why it shouldn't be fine for a media launch. |
13:40 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas: developers will care about that, but teachers will ask: "what's Fedora?" |
13:40 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: if you select the target audience wisely, it won't be a problem. |
13:40 |
|
SeanDaly: that's why you say: "to make it more stable." |
13:40 |
|
SeanDaly: you give rationals for *what* we're doing. |
13:41 |
SeanDaly |
I think the target audience should be developers |
13:41 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: we're telling the people that we're making these steps to make SoaS *more* awesome. |
13:41 |
mchua |
pipes up. I was just reading backscroll in #fedora-mktg and saw a potentially relevant conversation - short excerpt at http://fpaste.org/ZUWG/. |
13:41 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas: most of my 7 milllion teachers will ask: "what's Sugar?" |
13:42 |
|
to be clear, it is a major challenge to build a brand from zero |
13:42 |
mchua |
It's a huge challenge, and you're doing an amazing job at it. I'm not sure what we'd do without you, SeanDaly. |
13:42 |
SeanDaly |
we are encountering success because we are smart and depsite having no marketing/promotion budget |
13:42 |
|
despite |
13:42 |
mchua |
And because we have been producing *good stuff.* |
13:43 |
|
We fundamentally have a good product. It's rough. It's definitely nowhere near complete. But it's got plenty of potential. |
13:43 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: yes, that's always the case - you can only market colored water for a limited amount of time |
13:43 |
mchua |
It is also a major challenge to build a software learning environment - or a distro - from zero. |
13:43 |
SeanDaly |
Our shortcut to raising awareness with tiny budget is: news coverage |
13:44 |
mchua |
that's one of many possible strategies, but yeah, it seems to work well. :) |
13:44 |
SeanDaly |
We've had success with tech news and some general outlets, but not with education press yet |
13:44 |
mchua |
Anyway, the version numbering - I think this is something we can come back to, really. Right now, we have to figure out our engineering scope. |
13:44 |
|
Otherwise we won't have anything to assign a name or number *to*. |
13:44 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: I'm always open to strategy discussions :-) |
13:45 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: as am I. ;) |
13:45 |
sdziallas |
(uh, I'm, too. heh :) |
13:45 |
mchua |
how about this - sdziallas and I and whoever else wants to hang around will blaze through the first round of the slim package list, make that iso |
13:45 |
|
tell the list, attempt to summarize this conversation |
13:45 |
|
we'll tell 3 lists in 3 different ways. |
13:45 |
|
soas, to say "okay, here's what we're doing, engineeringwise, and why" |
13:46 |
SeanDaly |
If we can't offer a SoaS with Activities, it's a pity, but no big deal, we just delay the media launch to the fall |
13:46 |
mchua |
activities (or maybe ieap and devel or... wherever we think activity devs hang out) saying "here's why these things made soas this time and why the rest did not, and how you can get your stuff in next round by stepping up to do this work." |
13:46 |
SeanDaly |
But journalists and analysts watching us should not get confused by us skipping a number |
13:46 |
mchua |
and marketing, to say "here's what's going on in the other two lists," and then let you take it from there and figure out what marketing should do. |
13:47 |
|
first topic can be version number. ;) |
13:47 |
|
SeanDaly: how's that? |
13:47 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: many approaches possible: "adopt an Activity" |
13:47 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Yep yep. But we gotta get the first version of "slim SoaS" done first. (...I'm sure we'll think of a, um, better codename soon.) |
13:48 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: what is clear is that calling a maintenance release v3 makes my work much harder |
13:48 |
|
media launches are a lot of work |
13:48 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: Right. so we'll go ahead with the engineering, but we won't call it anything in particular until you have a chance to figure this out with the marketing team. |
13:49 |
SeanDaly |
no big deal to call this one off if it's not ready, after all it's not like we have made media investments already |
13:49 |
mchua |
or we'll call it "slim SoaS" or something less... silly sounding than that in the meantime. But not Mirabelle, not v3... for now. |
13:49 |
|
right. |
13:49 |
|
good to find this out early on. |
13:49 |
|
SeanDaly: I'm glad you popped in today. |
13:50 |
SeanDaly |
Mirabelle is cool, it's just "v3" I have a problem with for a non-media launch release |
13:50 |
mchua |
sdziallas: (does that sound like a reasonable temporary compromise - we'll just use a codename for this until we can figure out the version/name thing with the marketing folks?) |
13:50 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: I popped in for the SLOBs meeting |
13:50 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: wait, so you'd be fine with us calling it mirabelle, but not... v3? |
13:50 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: Yes, we had alrready agreed to save "Cloudberry" for fall version |
13:51 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: basically, "what should we call this slim-Activity-set SoaS version we're making, until such time the Marketing list can discuss what to actually call it?" |
13:51 |
|
SeanDaly: if that's mirabelle, then I think we're set. |
13:51 |
SeanDaly |
call it v2.x Mirabelle where x is any number you want |
13:52 |
mchua |
Heh, I usually think of Marketing wanting the names and engineering wanting the numbers :) |
13:52 |
SeanDaly |
This is not a big marketing team issue which requires lots of discussion, since it is a media launch cancellation |
13:52 |
sdziallas |
I believe rel-eng has a call in the versioning, too. |
13:52 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: no, the v1, v2, v3 came from me, for marketing purposes |
13:52 |
sdziallas |
I also don't get why this is a "media launch cancellation". |
13:52 |
|
is quite a bit lost in this convo. |
13:53 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas: we had planned a media launch for Mirabelle, but it's clear it won't be ready |
13:53 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: it will be ready. |
13:53 |
mchua |
so we'll do a recruitment push instead, is my understanding |
13:53 |
sdziallas |
and it will be released in May. |
13:53 |
mchua |
sdziallas: ready for recruitment, not for "hey end users, new stuff for you, out of the box!" |
13:54 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas: with or without Activities? |
13:54 |
|
without Activities, there's no point |
13:54 |
sdziallas |
mchua: right. but for people reading stuff also with "we're doing this BECAUSE..." |
13:54 |
SeanDaly |
However, it's now clear to me that recruitment and funding needs to be higher priority than before |
13:54 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: certainly with activities. but neither broken nor crappy activities nobody needs. |
13:54 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: So, clearly, not everyone is on the same page re: version numbering and naming and marketing stuff :) I'd like to have that convo on the marketing list |
13:55 |
|
...I'd also like to finish the engineering scoping of what Activities we will be shipping asap |
13:55 |
|
so we know what we will be marketing and/or recruiting for. |
13:55 |
|
If we don't know that, at some level, we're just talking hypotheticals. |
13:56 |
|
Let us figure out the product first, because we're under some hard resource constraints in terms of engineering firepower. |
13:56 |
|
And then we'll figure out the marketing on-list with you. |
13:56 |
|
SeanDaly: sound fair? |
13:56 |
SeanDaly |
Look at the press page... the next PR media campaign needs to be v3. That launch should happen in the fall if we can't ship with a set of Activities |
13:57 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: we are NOT saying that we're shipping "without a set of activities" |
13:58 |
SeanDaly |
mchua: the key takeaway is... an engineering crisis situation needs to have marketing in the loop asap, and not as an afterthought |
13:58 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: we are saying that we're shipping with a *well-selected* set of activites which can be adjusted and enhanced easily by following clear instructions. |
13:58 |
|
SeanDaly: what do you think does having three core modules (out of 12) for Sugar mean? |
13:59 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas: again, great for deployments, but useless for first-time tryers |
13:59 |
sdziallas |
SeanDaly: so we're trying... to target everybody at the same time? |
13:59 |
mchua |
SeanDaly: That's why I'm glad you're here, and why we're going to be sending this to marketing right after we finish picking the activity set. |
14:00 |
|
SeanDaly: but right now, Sebastian and I have to scope the feature list for engineering so we can do the engineering and actually have a product. |
14:00 |
SeanDaly |
sdziallas: No, we are accepting that next SoaS can't fulfiill demo role, no big deal we just roll back the media campaign to the fall. But the v3 number needs to be associated with the next campaign. |
14:00 |
mchua |
So I'm going to request we table this convo for a couple hours while sdziallas and I work that out, and then we'll take this to the marketing list. |
14:01 |
satellit__ |
sdziallas: off topic :we also need to fix the jabber.sugarlabs.org It has been down quite a time now. Needed for testing and demos |
14:01 |
mchua |
Okay, guys, I really need to get some food. |
14:01 |
sdziallas |
same here. |
14:01 |
SeanDaly |
me too need to go |
14:02 |
sdziallas |
satellit__: daveb is the guy for that. if nothing helps, emailing him should help. |
14:02 |
mchua |
sdziallas: Meet you back here when we're done eating and we'll go through the rest? |
14:02 |
|
sdziallas: (I might be an hour or two) |
14:02 |
sdziallas |
mchua: sounds good! |
14:02 |
|
mchua: I'll be around. |
14:02 |
mchua |
sdziallas: #endmeeting? |
14:02 |
|
yeah, sam here |
14:02 |
|
er, same here |
14:02 |
sdziallas |
#endmeeting |