I want sugar to be a lot easier to build from source. It’s slow and fragile right now and I suspect it’s one of the basic bottlenecks to contributions. I started by documenting what I would like it to be.
I worked on it during the weekend and achieved my first goal. It builds flawlessly on a clean Lucid virtual machine. It just required to merge the git modules, the various configure.ac and trivial changes to each module. As you might have guessed this is heavily inspired by Michael Stone omnibus sugar repository, credits and thanks to him.
Goal for this week, make it actually run 
My mail vs code ratio is incredibly bad these days. Next thing I’m going to do is to to setup a dev environment
Last week I spent some time reading through the wiki, the development team pages in particular. I was curious to see what it was like from the outside, since I’ve not been involved with the project for more than one year.
I have to admit the experience was bad:
* We are missing a technical roadmap. We have a schedule for the next release but it’s not clear what are the goals or even what people are working on.
* We don’t have clear instructions on how to setup a development or testing environment.
* We have no official documentation about activity development. A proper python SDK would go a long way to facilitate activity contributions, in my opinion.
* Some of our processes are a intimidating. I’m thinking about patch submission and new features in particular. It might be more a problem with the wording then with the actual processes.
A couple of more general observations:
* Most of the content looks outdated or the templates are just empty, which gives the wrong impression about the liveliness of the project.
* Reading mailing lists and following irc very regularly seems to be essential to contribute. Unfortunately that requires too much time for most people. I understand it a lot better now that I have an unrelated full time job.
* We have too many teams compared to the active contributors. Maybe merging or dropping some of them would help consolidating resources? For example I’m not convinced core and activity teams should be separated.
I could go on, but these are probably the most important points I wanted to raise. I would like to help addressing these issues, I don’t have a lot of time to spend on it but perhaps that actually gives me a good perspective!
Woa, I had promised an update more than one year ago… fail. Well, summarising one year of my life in a blog post is not going to work, so I will stick to the very basics and give another try to post regularly instead!
I’m now living in London and working for litl. I’m enjoying both the city and the new job a lot. I haven’t been hacking on Sugar for a long time, but I still intend to help out again one of these days! I’m just really bad at focusing on multiple things and the new job has been absorbing all of my attention so far.
Quick highlights about the last year:
- I’ve been having more of a social life then usual!
- Getting bored in London seems to be pretty much impossible. People and places are so varied, it’s like ten different cities in one. And culture is very accessible and alive.
- I’m reading a lot of books again which is something I had missed since I got a software job. As a side effect I feel english is becoming more and more my primary language, the one I think with.
- I want to go back to university, at least part time. Well, that’s something I wanted for a while, but now I started making concrete plans about it.
I’m on a two weeks vacation, for once without a laptop. I felt the need to just rest for a while and it’s working out very well, my energy is definitely refuelling. I will be in Italy with my family until Saturday and then spend one week in Spain. Looking forward to see the world cup final in Barcelona on Sunday! Go Spain!
I’m still alive! I’ll try to post an update on what I’m up to these days soon. I have not been able to read my personal email at all in the last couple of months. There was no hope to ever catch up with the backlog, so I just archived all of it. If you sent me mail and still need an answer from me please send it again. Sorry for the inconvenience, I’ll keep up with it again from now on (after having dropped some of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to, most likely).
