Priorities for Develop?

[Edward Cherlin]

I really like your localization idea. However, I think that finishing
core Sugar functionality (Journal integration, collaboration,
producing activity bundles) has to be the priority. Once we have the
essentials, we can ask the children what to do next. If they like
localization, I count that higher than management's opinion or the
volunteers' opinion, and I'll help you fight for it. If the children
didn't want it, I wouldn't worry about it.

2008/5/15 Jameson Chema Quinn <jquinn at cs.oberlin.edu>:
> 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, 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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>



-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay