Sugar 0.88 in F11-XO1

[Bernie Innocenti]

>From today's #sugar-meeting:

<erikos> bernie: I think a big problem to recruit 0.88 testers, is that there are no xo images
<erikos> bernie: scratch builds, like tomeu said, sounds good
<erikos> bernie: and then create a repo
<erikos> bernie: maybe mtd is interested in that, too

Ok, I'll create some custom F11-XO1 builds with the latest Sugar
packages retrofitted for testing purposes. Who would like to help me
out?

Here's an initial draft:

== Packages ==

Setup a yum repository with 0.88 packages backported to Fedora 11 (built
in Koji with --scratch or inside an F11 chroot, whichever is easiest).
 
It shouldn't require too much time, but it would be great if Fedora
packages could offload this work from me and make the result available
on people.sugarlabs.org in the form of a yum repo. Any volunteers?


== OLPC OS Builds ==

Setup an olpc-os-builder environment to fetch Sugar from the above repo.

I could easily do this at Paraguay Educa, but bandwidth to download the
resulting builds is very limited here, and downloading images of over
500MB from my public_html folder is going to be painfully slow from the
Internet.

Perhaps I could duplicate the build harness on one of our buildbot
slaves (in Italy) or a new VM on Treehouse. I doubt we can make
olpc-os-builder work on Sunjammer, as it's quite Fedora specific.


== Testing team ==

Test these builds with real kids. We have many kids with XO-1's in the
nearby town of Caacupe, but school starts tomorrow and we cannot disrupt
their regular classes too much. I think I could give an extra laptop to
a small number of smart and motivated volunteers to test Sugar 0.88 side
by side with 0.82 and 0.84 running on their regular XO.

I've already identified a group of kids with a hacker attitude who would
be perfect for the job. Educators tell me there are even a few kids who
taught themselves to use the shell.

Small teams of testers from other deployments would also be welcome, of
course.


== Collecting Feedback ==

Since Caacupe is 1hr away from the office, we'll teach our young testers
to communicate with the IRC activity and/or through email. Getting them
directly on #sugar may be problematic, but I don't want to send our
testers to a /dev/null place where nobody would answer their questions.

The best business practice to overcome language, cultural and age
barriers would be to interpose support engineers. But the open source
model requires a tighter feedback loop between users and developers.

I don't speak much Spanish myself, so I'm counting on other community
members to help out. As we're dealing with young people with little
computing experience, we'll have to be tolerant and responsible.
Hopefully, the increased confusion in #sugar will not bother technical
members of our community too much.


== Filing bugs ==

I'll try to file meaningful Trac tickets for our testers, possibly with
logs and a pre-analysis.

While our kids might not be able to report bugs on their own, Paraguay
Educa has a few field technicians who could learn to do it.


== Future opportunity: Fedora 12 ==

Optionally, try to upgrade to F12 or even F13. This would potentially
introduce new distro bugs as well as the Sugar bugs.

The benefit would be that we'd be working closer to upstream, but
perhaps we'd be better off leaving the bulk of the distro hacking work
to OLPC so we can focus our resources on testing only Sugar.


== Future opportunity II: Usability testing ==

The Design Team often expressed the need to test proposed UI patches in
the field. This is now possible to a certain extent, although with a
limited number of testers.

I could act as a dumb proxy: send me patches along with the feedback
forms that you'd like the users to fill-in, or something like that.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/