[sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar

[Simon Schampijer]

Michael Stone wrote:
> After mild provocation, Marco and Tomeu asked me to publish some of my
> reactions to sugar's architecture, design, and implementation. Here are
> a few initial comments.
> 
> 1) Sugar could better hold contributors if it (and its web presence)
> were designed to be extended and to highlight external contributions. 
> 
>    Evidence: Trac and xmonad both have thriving communities of
>    contributors based around their plugin architectures and community
>    sites like trac-hacks.org.
>    
>    Evidence: Sugar has already attracted new contributors by creating
>    three different extension points:
>    
>      Activities themselves
>      Device entries on the Frame
>      Control Panel Entries
> 
>    Evidence: Non-extensible aspects of Sugar like activity launching,
>    home view layout, frame contents, and the presence service have
>    stagnated.

What I find interesting is that as well areas where contributions are quite easy to 
do (Activities) have really stagnated. At the moment we lack maintainers for most 
of them. Browse, Pippy, Chat, Terminal and Etoys are well covered because they are 
maintained by core people.

Write, Read, TamTam, Paint, Record, Memorize to name a few have been really 
struggling lately. There are probably various reasons for that - one might be I 
that the activities have been taken out from the base system another one that the 
overall development has been really fast and no entry points/good documentation 
could be found. And well, the windows news were not helpful either.

Would be interesting to know what the activity maintainers struggled most to make 
it easier in the future.

For sugar core - I don't think that 'small fixes' need more than python skills. And 
we would be more than happy to have them. We will try in the next sugar dev meeting 
s to give out a few bugs that we think are easy to work on where people could help 
- stay tuned.

Best,
    Simon