[sugar] Proposal: Activity developers mailing list

[Christoph Derndorfer]

2008/8/3 Martin Dengler <martin at martindengler.com>

> On Sat, Aug 02, 2008 at 05:10:54PM -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Bastien wrote:
> > | - announce new activities
> > | - announce changes in ownership
> > | - check for dead/agonizing/orphaned activities
> > | - discuss API and dependancies issues
> >
> > All of these things are perfect for sugar at .  They are precisely what
> > sugar@ is for.
>
> They do not cover everything sugar@ is for[1], or is currently used
> for (see next point).
>
> > There is no need for an additional mailing list.
>
> I'm not sure I agree - sugar@ has so much traffic not
> relevant to "casual" activity authors (for example, your
> "Congratulations..." thread).
>
> I can't believe I did this, but I went through the July sugar@
> messages and categorized them into ones I thought would be appropriate
> for the AA list and ones not (thus for the current sugar@ list).
>
> Totals:  808 messages
> AA - 293 messages 36.3%
> SS - 515 messages 63.7%
>
> You may see the details here:
> http://dev.laptop.org/~mdengler/sugar_list_july_2008_categorized.txt<http://dev.laptop.org/%7Emdengler/sugar_list_july_2008_categorized.txt>
>
> > - --Ben
>
> Martin
>
> 1. From http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar :
> Sugar is the internal code name for everything users see. This
> includes the sharing and collaboration experience, base set of tasks,
> and the entire desktop stack. This mailing list is to discuss the
> design and the implementation of that effort.


(adding Sugar back to the conversation, not sure why it was dropped)

I'm generally the first one to argue against YAML (yet-another-mailing-list)
as I'm already subscribed to almost 30 OLPC-related ones...

However I do believe that the idea of a mailing-list targeted to
activity-developers has some merit to it.

Contrary to Albert's comment I don't think an announcement only list for
when the API breaks is enough, this is such a fundamental thing that should
be communicated on all channels (mailing lists, wiki pages, sugar almanac,
you name it) when it happens. The fact that this hasn't been done in the
past just shows how much is lacking when it comes to making it easy for
people to contribute activities without having to follow all the
conversations on sugar, devel, etc.

Looking at the big picture we we should be thinking about how mailing-lists
are going to be used down the road anyway, for example whether there's going
to be a gen. 2 (XOXO) list for all things related to that project. There
we're going to have the same issue that potentially some (but definitely not
all!) issues will overlap with current devel- and sugar discussions, but I
guess that's what cross-posting is for.

Getting back to the discussion at hand: In a perfect world an
activity-developer would not have to worry about "core"-issues as mostly
discussed on sugar and devel, as that stabilized *information* (the outcome
and decisions based on the discussions on the lists) would be accessible
somewhere on the API doc, wiki, sugar-almanac, activity handbook, etc. The
activity-developers mailing-list could then be used to exchange tricks of
the trade, ask questions (such as Alex's current one about the difference
between sugar-launch and launching from the home-view), solicit help for
testing and localization (CC'ing the appropriate mailing-lists in the
process) and just plainly sharing ideas and suggestions for activities
without actually writing them oneself (another big issue because at the
moment we don't have a forum for children, parents, educators, content
creators, graphic designers, etc. to share their input).

Anyway, just my 2 jet lagged euro-cents,
Christoph



>
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-- 
Christoph Derndorfer
Co-Editor, OLPCnews
url: www.olpcnews.com
e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
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