[Etoys] Fwd: Trial 3

[Bert Freudenberg]

Here's what the Sugar developers plan for the next milestone.  
Thoughts related to Etoys below.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Marco Pesenti Gritti" <mpgritti at gmail.com>
> Date: July 28, 2007 11:53:33  GMT+02:00
> To: "Sugar List" <sugar at laptop.org>
> Subject: [sugar] Trial 3
>
> Hello,
>
> here is a list of improvements and problems which I think we should  
> address during the Trial 3 development cycle. It's going to be a  
> very short cycle (feature freeze on 8/13) but, as usual, we will do  
> our best to get the important changes done in time.
>
> * List a few, important features that makes a big difference for  
> the user experience and implement them. I hope the design meetings  
> next week will help to figure out this list.
>
> * Land the security patches with the changes in the activity  
> instance creation process that they will require. Michael will be  
> sending patches to the list soon.
>
> * Get the Journal to the next level. We need to figure out the  
> multiple objects per activity issue from the user experience point  
> of view and then refactor the API to support it. We want to land  
> versioning support. And finally I think it would be good to figure  
> out how datastore relates to the security system.
>
> * Simplify tubes setup in Activity. I can't see any reason why it  
> couldn't be simpler than a few calls.  We don't want to have  
> activity authors deal with all the complexities which are currently  
> in HelloMesh.
>
> * Refactor the Activity class to give it a coherent and almost  
> stable API.
>
> * The shell service needs to be in a separate process/thread than  
> the UI one, to avoid performance issues and dead locks. Tomeu is  
> already working on it, I want to get it in as soon as possible.
>
> Feedback and help are both welcome!
>
> We made some really good progress during the Trial 2 cycle, stuff  
> is coming together!
>
> Marco

The change affecting Etoys the most will certainly be the  
introduction of security features. Other than that there still is a  
lot of things that need to be put into place for proper system  
integration:

- keep etoys working after security is enabled. Etoys will have to  
request many security capabilities: networking, read-only access to  
images, sounds, movies, etc. in the datastore, camera, microphone,  
not sure what else. We may need to hook up to dialogs provided by  
Sugar for loading these files.

- rewrite collaboration to properly announce sharing via presence  
service, allow joining and leaving of people. Allow project sharing  
(that is, transmit a project to the other parties when they join).  
Use Tubes for sending/receiving packets, which will take care of  
routing (it's not yet clear we will be guaranteed to get a routable  
IPv6 address). Allow sharing of more than one etoys instance  
(currently the second instance will fail as we try to open a socket  
on the same host port again) - or at least provide a proper  
notification.

- improve old and provide new translations

- use system fonts, pango rendering, right-to left text layout

- right-to-left layout of viewers etc.

... and surely quite some more that I forgot right now. We should  
file tickets for those ...

Now I'm on family vacation the next three weeks (and I really need  
some). Someone else will have to handle creating and uploading new  
RPMs and bundles. I just documented what I do currently for a release  
here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Etoys_RPM_and_XO_bundle

I'll do one more release before leaving and it will be Jim's call to  
include it for Trial-2 or not.

- Bert -