[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Response from school staff regarding progress tracking

[David Bruce]

Hi Uwe,

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 1:57 PM, uwe <uwe.geercken at web.de> wrote:
> hello everybody,
>
> I haven't heart a lot in the last two weeks on this issue nor did I get
> any feedback on it. is everyone busy? or do we have new ideas or
> something else?

For me, I've been quite busy with "real life".  What time I've had for
tux4kids has been spent trying to get the paths and permissions
settled for the word list editor.  The first release of this (1.8.0)
has some issues in both Linux and Windows.  In Linux, it works fine as
a locally-installed program, but needs some adjustments to behave
properly as a distro-packaged application.  In fact, if a distro has
really strict/pedantic security policies, it may not possible to
provide shared custom word lists at all without manual intervention by
the admin.

In Windows, the word list editor in 1.8.0 relies on "wide-open"
security settings (i.e. C:\Program Files being user-writable), which
is common in the real world but not good practice - so we have been
working on fixing those issues as well.

So hopefully there will be a tuxtype-1.8.1 soon.

However, there are more issues that need work. Neither tuxtype-1.8.0
or the current tuxmath have a usable Mac build. Also, tuxtype
apparently doesn't currently handle non-Western keyboard input
correctly (i.e. beyond the first 256 unicode chars), although it
properly displays non-Western text.

On the tuxmath side, we have yet to release a post-GSoC build with the
multiplayer LAN support - it isn't too far from being releasable,
although there are still some special cases which are not handled
properly (more than one tuxmath server instance on the local network,
for example).  Also, tuxmath does not yet build for Windows.

Beyond that, there is a ton of stuff from GSoC that needs to be
finished or integrated into tuxtype and tuxmath.  The Qt4-based
tux4kids-admin tool is still in limbo - a lot of work has been done,
but there's no documentation or license info, no simple "make install"
target, and no way to make tarball packages.  Also, a lot of work has
been done to factor out the common code in tuxmath and tuxtype into a
t4k-common library, but that still isn't packagable.

So, while I'm excited by getting real progress tracking into tuxtype
and recognize its importance, I've got all I can handle just to get
all of our current unfinished business into a releasable state.

Cheers,

David Bruce