[Sugar-devel] Future of Rainbow + Sugar?

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 24.02.2009, at 19:09, Carol Farlow Lerche wrote:

> Bert,  Are you satisfied with the number of activity developers?   
> Are you satisfied with the number of developers within the  
> deployments?  Have you noticed the periodic questions on the  
> developer-oriented lists about Rainbow security and whether it is  
> causing mysterious symptoms?  I'm not, and I have.

I am virtually certain that Rainbow is not the major obstacle to  
getting more activity developers.

> Asking for better documentation doesn't imply that the facility is  
> new.  It recognizes that development has reached a local minimum in  
> an important component that is not well understood by many.  My post  
> was a request to the most knowledgeable person, Michael to do the  
> service of taking the time to write a document that clearly lays out
>
> .  the purpose (not in security speak but in terms of the benefits  
> it brings to end users),
>
> .  the relevance of APIs versus packaging elements versus choices by  
> the sugar shell/infrastructure developers,
>
> .  things that the activity developers can and can't do (given that  
> I, at least, hope that new developers will participate, who have  
> preconceptions from other environments),
>
> Things that are hoped for in future development (well delimited from  
> things that are there now.)
>
> Good documentation is hard, and wiki pages are only good  
> documentation if the wiki is maintained with great discipline (which  
> I fear is not the case at w.l.o).  But for a subtle and complex  
> feature such as Rainbow, good documentation would be a motivator for  
> use both within and outside the sugar community.

Agreed. However, what activity authors need to know about rainbow is  
documented, and it really is not much. For example, here

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Low-level_Activity_API#Security

This is not even a full page, and if activity authors use the Python  
Sugar toolkit they can worry even less about this.

- Bert -