We made awesome progress again and triaged all the remaining bugs which had the bug status ‘Unconfirmed’.
Thanks to our team, Frederick, Gary and Tomeu and our technical backup Walter and Sascha.
As a little homework for next week I would like us to check all the bugs that we marked ‘NeedInfo’ if we already got feedback. In certain cases ping the author again or if open for a long time without a reply we can close it using this description.
Weeeh!
A new Soas-1 is out. It contains all the bug fixes that made it into head in the last days. And you can use Wade Brainerd’s fabulous Typing Turtle to get you going in 10 finger typing - /me won already a Gold Medal.
Get it when it is still sticky!
News:
Sugar
- Don’t add_bundle on activity dir change when installed already #442
- Make mute sound code togglable
- Keyhandler: Map XF86Search to the journal search
- Keyhandler: Catch all exceptions (thanks to silbe)
- Give time for atexit to execute when closing the emulator #435
- Dont hardcode the maximum amount of entries to cache in the journal #72
- Add standard ‘Print’ shortcut to take a screenshot
- Use keyboard specific keys to set the volume #430
- Update to new DBus policy #307
- Fix palette appearance on right-click #403
- Switch to existing instance of an activity if it’s already running #410
Sugar-toolkit
- Process .py files in subdirectories ‘./setup genplot’ #391 (alsroot)
- Improve error handling of calls to XGrabKey #431
- Cleanup temp files at exit #435
- Let activities provide their own implementation of get_preview() #152
- Show/Hide the color palette correctly (#374)
- Support setting None as the secondary text #384
- Only display one line in the secondary text of a clipping palette #384
- Switch to existing instance of an activity if it’s already running #410
- Reveal the palette on right click on an activity icon #409
Dear Sugar Community,
This is Release Candidate 2 for the upcoming 0.84 Release - see the [1] for more details. Only one more week to go in this release cycle. Please test this release and report all the bugs you find that we are able to fix them in time. A friendly BugSquad [2] will be available to triage those bugs accordingly and the developers can never have enough bug food. If you have non-bug feedback about features you can use the sugar-devel mailing list to share it with us.
From a user point of view we want to highlight the following changes that have been made:
Resume by Default
Resume by default is now the way we handle activity startup. The option in the Favourites View palette has been removed completely. You can still start a new instance using the ‘Start’ option in the Activity palette.
View Source
There has been some refinements to the View Source dialog. You can access it from the Activity palette in the Frame or by using ‘Shift+Alt+V’ directly.
The coloured activity icon represents the source of the activity instance. The outlined activity icon represent the bundle source for the activity itself, the template. We use this to help draw a distinction between the “activity instance” and the “activity bundle”
Using the uncoloured outline to represent the bundle vs the coloured icon to represent an instance has been the design cue all along.
File transfer
Updated the file transfer code to make use of the new icons that Eben draw for us.
Read
Morgan fixed an error that was introduced due to changes in Evince.
Browse
Martin Langhoff has been adding functionality to authenticate with the Schoolserver. When registered with the server an HTTP Cookie is created to ease the use of services on the Schoolserver in future sessions. Thanks to Daniel Drake Browse propagates the current locale now. This helps to use web services and pages in your mother language. Try it out with the [http://addons.sugarlabs.org/ addons] page for example.
Thanks everyone for your great contributions!
[1] The Sucrose Release Schedule can be found here
[2] More Info about the BugSquad at
[3] You can find more details and screenshots at
Yesterday was a day out in Berlin. We started with the goal to have a great day without spending a cent for entrance and receiving as much cultural input as possible.
First we went to the “Zucker Museum” a great place to discover the history of sugar and many more. Of course as well for Sugar developers a fun place to visit. A pity is that most of the descriptions are in German which makes the explanations a bit hard to read for non locals - apart from that the museum offers a lot of value.
The second place we went to was the “Jugendmuseum” in Berlin Schöneberg. They have a permanent exhibition called Villa Global which gives you the chance to dive into the culture of 14 different people. Each person is dedicated one room containing personal items telling you stories about the person and his culture. And you can dig in as deep as you like, you are invited to open cupboards, boxes read in books laying around and listen to music. Here is one example how a room look like. As in the “Zucker Museum” the explanations are in German - but even someone that does not speak German can make a lot of sense out of the haptic, sonorous and visual information offered.
And as if that was not enough, we went to the “HörTheater - Die Zeugen” in the “Kulturbrauerei” to listen to a radio play - of course for free as well.
So if you look for interesting stuff to do besides the mainstream and have no cent in your pocket - there is a lot you can do in Berlin, some of the options are laid out above.
Sugar is a community effort. In order for Sugar to be successful, it needs the participation of a large number of people who share common goals while maintaining independence, so that each participant has the ability to act independently.
A community can not have the same structure and can not be operating in the same way as an organisation with employees is. For these reasons, Sugar Labs follow the following Structure and Terms of Operation (from Sugar Labs: a learning and software-development community):
Structure
Operation
Since the first days of Sugar Labs many people joined and took responsibility. Especially in the last two weeks we have seen many people popping up and asking where and how they could contribute and directly took action. This is amazing to see. Kudos to all of you. It is vital it is moving!
Sugar is there, it is yours - put in what you think it should be and use common sense to reach the goals.
Many must have wondered what a Sugar developer is doing during his weekends. He is visiting Germany’s Sweetest Collection.
This exhibition would have given thousands of explanations why our software is called ‘Sugar’. As well for people still having issues with the taxonomy used around our learning playground this is the right place to go to answer all your burning questions.
For people still looking for new ways to create teams around Sugar you might consider the ICUMSA (International Commission for Uniform Methods of Sugar Analysis).
Next week I will tell you more about ‘Growing the Sugar Beets’ and ‘Extracting Beet Sugar’.
Yesterday we had the second BugSquad Triage meeting. Success, the members that showed up last week made this week as well and we had Walter joining in as well. Thanks to “Winner for the best triage answer Frederick”, “I triage my own tickets Gary”, “Quickest triager on planet Tomeu”, “Is the bugsquad meeting over already Walter” and the lurking backup support Greg and Mel.
Our goal this week was to reduce the number of Bugs that had the status ‘Unconfirmed’. Which basically means:
“This bug has recently been added to the database. Nobody has validated that this bug is true. Users who have obtained permissions from the BugSquad may confirm this bug, changing its state to NEW. It may also be directly resolved and marked RESOLVED, or more information may be necessary, moving it to NEEDINFO.” [1]
We split up the number of bugs we had and each member went away triaging and we were discussing issues in #sugar-meeting. We used the latest Soas image to verify bugs as good as possible and for the ones that we we couldn’t we moved to NEEDINFO or used our team knowledge to judge on them.
After an hour we were down from 45 to 20 hits and this morning there are only 13 left. That is a really good outcome.
See you next week!
[1] Bug Status
Dear Sugar Community,
This is Release Candidate 1 for the upcoming 0.84 Release - see [1] for more details. Only two more weeks to go in this release cycle. Please test this release and report all the bugs you find that we are able to fix them in time. A friendly BugSquad [2] will be available to triage those bugs accordingly and the developers can never have enough bug food. If you have non-bug feedback about features you can use the sugar-devel mailing list to share it with us.
From a user point of view we want to highlight the following changes that have been made in this release:
Journal
The translation of the dates in the Journal is working now again. Please verify with your favorite language that this works for you. A ‘Clear search’ button has been added to the ‘No matching entries’ message, following Eben’s specification. Also the space used and left is now displayed in the volume palette in the Journal.
Journal entry palette
The journal entry palette has seen some great improvements. We have a ‘View Details’ option that brings you to the details of the entry directly. Also the icon for the file transfer was designed and added by Gary C. Martin. Furthermore you do not need to go to the detail view any more to select the activity you want to start or resume the entry with - this option is now available in the palette as well.
Naming Alert
When you stop an activity from the Frame the activity is resumed and one can refine the activity metadata in the Naming Alert. As well a saving error of the activity will not prevent one any more from closing the activity due to the Naming Alert.
Palettes
There were some positioning issues of the palette that got fixed. Please report back any issues you still find. Another palette related fix was that on right click on an Access Point icon we do reveal the palette as it is the behavior in all the other places in the UI and do not try to connect to the Access Point.
Keep error when displaying a file in Browse, Read, ImageViewer
This is one of my favorite fixes as this has been broken for quite a while. When trying to display for example an image in Browse or the ImageViewer there was an keep error when closing the activity.
Resume activity
Last release we added the ability to resume an activity by default instead of creating a new instance. The list of the available entries in the palette when you hover of the activity in the home view is now updated directly. As this is an interesting new feature, we would like to hear about any issues you might have with it and positive feedback of course as well.
Control Panel
We now hide any OLPC-specific fields on non-xo machines. For example in the ‘About my Computer’ section we display the build dependent on the distribution (i.e. Fedora). As the Power section was only relevant on the XO, it is hidden in non OLPC distributions.
Frame Devices
Right-clicking on the speaker device icon does not mute the speakers anymore.
Clipboard
Several fixes were made to the detection of images dragged and dropped to the clipboard in the Frame.
Thanks everyone for your great contributions!
In behalf of the sugar community,
Your Release Team
[1] The Sucrose Release Schedule can be found here
[2] More Info about the BugSquad at
[3] You can find more details and screenshots at
______________________________________
Modules that changed:
Glucose modules
* sugar-toolkit 0.83.6
Glucose news
sugar-toolkit
* Dates in journal are not translated {{Bug|55}}
* Keep error when displaying a file in Browse, Read, ImageViewer, etc {{Bug|258}}
* Palette positioning fixes {{Bug|298}}
* ‘Resume’ activity window when NamingAlert is displayed {{Bug|293}}
* Naming alert prevents activity close on keep error {{Bug|224}}
sugar
* Resume Activity list is not updated directly {{Bug|322}}
* Fix network panel on XO (Sascha Silbe) {{Bug|290}}
* Only show cp power section on xo {{Bug|320}}
* Add logout option to the buddy menu (Sayamindu) {{Bug|207}}
* Launch activity also when clicking on the palette icon {{Bug|335}}
* Use the activity icon for the ‘Start new’ palette item {{Bug|314}}
* Close the object chooser when the activity is closed {{Bug|329}}
* Dates in journal are not translated {{Bug|55}}
* Don’t mute when right-clicking the speaker icon {{Bug|278}}
* Correctly cache the connection to the OHM service {{Bug|249}}
* Show launcher screen immediately after the user clicks to start an activity {{Bug|243}}
* Use documend-send icon (Gary C Martin) {{Bug|227}}
* Try harder to get an icon for a clipping
* Hide the journal activity in the home view {{Bug|87}}
* Correctly initialize the TrayIcon
* Add ‘View Details’ option to object palette in journal
* Translation updates
* Hide OLPC-specific fields on non-xo machines {{Bug|133}}
* Add a ‘Clear search’ button to ‘No matching entries’ message {{Bug|266}}
* Correctly detect when a query in the journal is empty {{Bug|255}}
* Avoid launching two instances of the same activity instance {{Bug|238}}
* Add start-with option to objectpalette in the journal
* Fix dnd of icons in the favorite view {{Bug|213}}
* Right click on AP should reveal palette not connect to AP {{Bug|10}}
* Display space used and left in the volume palette in the journal {{Bug|33}}
* Don’t update the zoom level when a dialog window pops up
* Fix filtering the objectchooser with data types {{Bug|219}}
sugar-artwork
* Add documend-send icon (Gary C Martin) {{Bug|227}}
* Add application-x-generic as a copy of application-octet-stream {{Bug|13}}
* Add icons drive-harddisk and drive
sugar-datastore
* Rename the installed package from olpc.datastore to carquinyol
* Only try to remove the checksum dir if it already exists
Gary C. Martin, Greg DeKoenigsberg, F. Grose and myself met today for the first real Sugar Labs BugSquad triage meeting. We kindly were backed up for technical questions by Tomeu, Chris and Sayamindu.
As this was an action meeting we started from the open Sucrose bugs and triaged them using the BugSquad triage guidelines.
We got quite a few bugs triaged and were able to nail things down - which is great! Gary stated that he was learning new stuff in this meeting, well he played the ‘escape the room’ xev game mostly 
What me made happy the most was that Gary was able to say after the meeting that he may be braver now doing a triage or so (when a simple case). Success!
All in all it was fun - as Greg says: “It’s always fun getting shit done.” Espacially when you are not on your own. That is why we do this again next week at the same time (16.00 UTC). So come - join the Squad - you do not need any programming knowledge to be in the BugSquad; in fact it is a great way to return something to the Sugar community if you cannot program.
Logs: bugsquad-meeting.log
So sweet that our tracker got sticky and needs a bit of triage help
to get going again. That is why the Sugar Labs BugSquad meets this
week for their first Triage session.
When: Thursday 12 February, 2009 - 16.00 (UTC)
Where: irc.freenode.net, #sugar-meeting
Who: You do not need any programming knowledge to be in the BugSquad; in
fact it is a great way to return something to the Sugar community if you
cannot program.
What: Read about the work a triager is doing.
To verify bugs it is best to use the latest Sugar on a Stick image.
Looking forward to see you on Thursday.