First Draft Development Process Proposal

[Michael Stone]

Bryan,

Thanks very much for the detailed feedback. Here are my comments:

> 1) Be able to remove activities to free up space, including activities
> that come pre-installed. 

Noted. Can you or Bernie supply a patch which accomplishes the desired
behavior? If someone can come up with a halfway decent patch, I'm more
than happy to try to see that this gets resolved.

> 2) Need to be able to launch activities from the web browser. 

Here are two dirty hacks and a long-term project:

 1) Hack Browse to run the activities itself.

 2) De-isolate Browse in your images and have it call the same code that 
    Sugar calls in order to launch things.

 3) Teach Rainbow about systems with multiple users. Activities run as
    their own users and Rainbow should be happy to run more activities
    on their behalf so long as the authority of the resulting uids is
    "appropriately" bounded. (Careful analysis will be needed here, but
    there's no reason not to start experimenting now.)
 
> We are moving towards html and likely Moodle to organize our activities
> together w/ supplementary reading and other materials. The students will
> use an offline html page and click on links to launch a python or EToys
> activity in a separate window, and not w/in the browser.

If you're using an offline HTML page and you still want to provide an
isolated internet Browser, then just hack up a copy of the Browse to run
de-isolated but with its networking disabled. You could disable the
network in two ways - either by hacking up the xulrunner source code or
with my disablenetwork() LSM. I'd love for someone to start
independently testing it as I begin to think about moving it upstream.

(NB: If you use the disablenetwork() approach, be sure to use
Sugar/Rainbow to launch your activities so that they have network
access.)

> 3) Stable collaboration :) I know this is a hard one.

We just put Cerebro into joyride. We think that some activities, such as
Read, will be easy to modify to use it. You might try it and see. Which
activities do you care about most in this regard?

(If you want to play with Cerebro on your existing image, then just
install the RPM and poke Polychronis if you need help.)

(FYI, the configuration management scripting that Martin [and Uruguay,
for that matter] have done might be of some interest to you as a
labor-savor. Poke Martin or Emiliano [have you met?] for details.)

> 4) Longer battery life, it's ok w/ us if you turn off the mesh while the
> XO goes into suspend mode.

This can be manually tested in the latest joyrides. Any help you can
offer in testing them would be greatly appreciated, for obvious reasons.

Regards,

Michael