[Server-devel] What's cooking in the XS pot, support, and important news

[Martin Langhoff]

Several bits of news and updates.

*Development*

 - Today I am checking 0.5.2-dev01 and respin things so a -dev02 has
all the bits we want.

 - Moodle track - this is what I am working on at the moment,
automagic auth and the general "make moodle just work" and
moodle-ejabberd integration.

 - rproxy is back! Rusty Russell and Toby Collett have reignited the
rproxy flame. Rusty has published crcsync in
http://ccan.ozlabs.org/info/crcsync.html . Toby is working on the
apache mod_cache / mod_proxy side of things. I'm very excited about
these things

 - Anaconda patches, revisor revisions - I am wondering how to
integrte Jerry's patched anaconda and Jeroen's patched revisor into my
build without introducing regressions. We have been churning out isos
that are predictable -- the few bugs from the build/install toolchain
are known and have workarounds.

 - Content repositories - once Moodle works better, it's a very
compelling tool to use. Except that the handling of repositories --
even local repositories with content plus metadata that would allow
the teacher to browse and search to pick what to use -- is all in
Moodle 2.0. And it's not something we can backport. I hope we can find
a way to fake it until 2.0 is out (end of 2009?). More details at
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=117410

*Support*

I am also very happy to see that we have more people from deployments
on the list. Questions and input from deployments are incredibly
important. In my mind, server-devel is really just
"server at lists.laptop.org" -- and the dynamic here has been excellent
in this regard.

In that sense, the more we help eachother the better. People on this
list that are working at deployments know a lot, and are better
sources of info, tips and techniques than me.

*Post 0.6 things change*

Lastly, I wanted to mention - soon after 0.6 is released it is very
likely that my fulltime engagement with OLPC will come to an end. So I
want to give this project as much as I can in the limited time I have.
After 0.6 I will endeavour to do bit of further work on the Moodle
side of things, and offer as much support as possible.

My hope is to continue developing and supporting the XS within my time
constraints. And to stage a comeback if possible :-)

So between now and end-of-march / mid-april we have a lot to do. There
are lots of things we can do together to make 0.6 an outstanding
release that works great for deployment teams across the world, a
release that gives new tools to XO users.

And if we can do that -- it will be something to celebrate and be
proud if. We will be making things better for our XO users -- even if
one tiny bit.

cheers,



martin
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff