What to expect from developers, are there any left? (was Re: rotate button sucks on the XO)

[Walter Bender]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 12:39 PM, NoiseEHC <NoiseEHC at freemail.hu> wrote:
> Daniel Drake wrote:
>> It is unlikely that you (as a user, rather than a deployment)
>> reporting bugs to OLPC will result in another software release *direct
>> from OLPC* (such as 8.2.2), because development of 8.2.x is mostly
>> discontinued and will really only be driven by deployments.
>> Have you read?
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Future_releases
>> It may not answer all your questions but it is the most concrete
>> documentation that I have seen so far.
>>
> I have already read that page and was aware of those issues.
> Unfortunately it does not answer my questions.
>> In terms of reporting bugs, the process of "upstreaming" everything
>> basically means that OLPC is no longer the distributor and that bugs
>> should be reported directly to the people who are "more responsible"
>> for the them.
>>
> My main problem is that knowing who is more responsible requires knowing
> linux more that I am comfortable with (I am a Windows developer). Here
> are just 3 examples to show my point:
> 1. Today I noticed that my simple program can crash the whole sugar
> desktop and the X server. Shall I report it to somewhere? I do not even
> know where to look for log files to attach to a bug report. Also if
> nobody will fix it (I cannot fix it that is sure...) then why should I
> care? Does it mean that if no deployment will bark that the desktop&X
> can be crashed then it will not be fixed ever?

I don't know what your simple program does, but it sounds like it
could be a Sugar bug. You should file a ticket at dev.sugarlabs.org.
If it is not related to Sugar, we'll try to pass the report along to
the proper place.

Log files are viewable with the Log Viewer Activity and also found in
~/.sugar/default/logs

> 2. I can reliably (100%) trigger the "cannot connect to WPA and the
> dialog asks for a password endlessly" bug but unfortunately I do not
> know how to debug that thing. To tell you the truth I do not even know
> where to look for the code of NetworkManager (somebody told that this
> can be the problem) and even if I knew it usually I cannot compile
> downloaded linux code for some arcane reason beyond my understanding. So
> for example in this situation what should I do? Is this NetworkManager
> part of some linux distro, or is it an XO thing? If it is part of
> fedora, who should I report bugs to?

It does sound like NM. Look at ~/.sugar/default/nm

There is still an engineer at OLPC looking into WPA on the latest builds.

> 3. Okay, I have forgot the third one... :)

Cannot help you here.

> Note that I am totally aware that these things are not your
> responsibility, I would just like to have some answers from somebody. If
> the solution is installing some distro then I will do it, the big
> question is that which one will be the official one?

Both OLPC and the Sugar team is working closely with the Fedora. Sugar
is working with other distros as well, but for the XO hardware in the
short term, Fedora is the most stable.

>> What would you do if you ran Ubuntu on your main computer but some of
>> the buttons on your keyboard were not working correctly? You would
>> file a bug with Ubuntu, who would hopefully either fix the problem on
>> their own back, or help you to report the issue to the developers of
>> the related package (which would likely be one of the X.org input
>> components, in the case of keyboard troubles).
>>
> Frankly, if some of my buttons would not work in Ubuntu I would simply
> format the machine and install Windows. :)
>> Work with the relevant upstream component. In this case, you are
>> working on a sugar activity, so develop it as a platform-neutral
>> activity at sugarlabs.org, and work with sugarlabs' standard processes
>> of getting activities included in distributions.
>>
> This is not an activity in the strictest sense, it is more like a
> library which shows what the XO hardware can do in animation. After that
> probably I will use the lessons learned to optimize GCompris and PyGame
> because currently they look like Powerpoint presentations... So the
> whole point is to work fast on a physical XO hardware. Of course if
> somebody will tell me that the XO is a dead thing and OLPC will cease
> then I will reconsider wasting my time.
>

Cannot comment on where OLPC is going re XO hardware. Sugar Labs will
not "cease".

-walter
-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org