Priorities for Develop?

Jameson "Chema" Quinn jquinn at cs.oberlin.edu
Thu May 15 20:26:09 EDT 2008


I am planning to apply to OLPC for a job as a contractor, working on
Develop. I have been told that my first-priority feature, automatic code
localization <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bityi/GSoC>, would be hard to
justify on the OLPC roadmap. So I'd like to hear some votes/priorities on
the following "dream" features, listed roughly from easiest to hardest (+/-
two slots):

1. auto-pylint
2. doctools
3. peekaboo-like (figleaf with xmacro - throw autogenerated events at an
activity, watch coverage, and log stack traces. When I worked at
Palm/3Com/PalmSource, they called it "gremlins".)
4. autocompletion
5. move towards collaboration, starting with support for merges and
changelogs (new-version notification and real-time collaboration would both
come later than this)
6. automatic code localization (program in Python with
Spanish/Chinese/whatever keywords, but it is real python on-disk)
7. debugger
8. Gui designer (a la glade)
9. other (bug tracking)

(for those unfamiliar with Develop currently, it has source coloring, good
find-replace, log viewing, rudimentary version control through the journal.
Currently I am working on updating Sugar's bundle format, this will make
Develop more useful for existing activities, and make sugar smarter about
updates; for instance you will be able to have a dev version and a stable
version of your activity coexist on a given XO. This current work would be
done before I would even begin with anything from the above list.)

Personally, I would most like to work on feature number 6 (code
localization). In my view, with hundreds of thousands of Spanish-speaking
kids on the xo, this feature would be, not only a great addition to the
education mission of OLPC, not only (if done right) an advancement for
computer science in general, but also an investment in getting future
activities written. So I would be happy if that got a broad acclaim of
support. But I want to be able to feed my family and code for the XO at the
same time, so I will apply for a contract with whatever looks to me has the
best cost/votes ratio.

For easier voting, I have pretty much copied this same email to
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Develop/roadmap . Feel free to vote here on mail
if you have something to contribute to the discussion, and I will copy any
results of this thread to that page, but if you just have some votes you can
just vote there.
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