Day Four

Today we had a class discussion about a few different topics.  To start, each team went around and discussed our current progress about making a connection with the open source community.  We told the class about our experience with SugarLabs.  We were able connect to SugarLabs' IRC channel, and join their development mailing list.  The development mailing list sends out roughly 20 emails a day which is somewhat overwhelming, but at least we know that the community is active.  Their IRC is embedded directly into their website, and they have a ton of different  channels (including a "newbie" channel -- which is where we started out).  They also have a complete history of every conversation that's existed throughout their IRC chat rooms, which is very convenient.  

The next topic was about our reflections on the Cathedral and the Bazaar.  Everyone went around and made comments about interesting topics/ideas that were discussed in the readings.

Our team just finished meeting up tonight about our full report that we need to give on Tuesday.  Meeting at Taco Boy was an excellent idea, much more exciting than the usual places (JC Long or the library).  Good food makes the meeting much more relaxing and enjoyable, and feel less like work.  Our report will be posted on the group's wiki by class time on Tuesday.  Alex created a document collecting our ideas on the full report, while we all contributed things to add to the report.  

For the majority of the time at the meeting, I focused on trying to get a head start on how our development environment will work, and what exactly we would like to do to contribute to the project.  SugarLabs is a Linux-based operating system that runs on a USB stick that they like to call "Sugar on a Stick".  Anyone can download it and begin using it whenever, however I'm still hung up on the best way to set up an efficient development environment.  For example, if I were to change a few lines of code, I want to arrange the easiest way for me to test these changes on the Sugar OS.  Since it runs on a USB stick, it sounds like it may be a more complicated process to get to since we can't develop directly in this OS.  This would require developing in OSX (or Windows, Linux, etc.), and then possibly compiling/restarting the machine in the new environment to test out the changes... not exactly my ideal environment.  

I found their source code and downloaded it onto my machine.  Turns out they use a version control system called GIT.  Since we'll be using Subversion for our class, looks like we'll have to keep track of both.  We'll only really need to worry about GIT to get the latest version of the projects, and to publish any changes we make (probably towards the end of the semester).  For the most part, we'll probably be dealing with Subversion.

Details about how we'll develop aside, the best way to get started will be to work on a bug.  It'll help us get a feel for the code and to the development process.  Further down the road, the team would like to focus on creating/modifying what SugarLabs calls "Activities" - the learning-based games that the users play within the Sugar OS.