status report

[Jordan Mantha]

Hi all,

Trying to give a status report on everything Edubuntu I've been
doing/concerned with.

First, I dropped rasmol from the ship-addon seed as it's just too old
and is not very user friendly. I would prefer to get something modern
and active like gnome-chemistry-utils or gchemical in it's place. Do we
have an idea of size limitations for the new .iso scheme? I'm assuming
there's plenty of room, but are we planning on adding any large apps?

Secondly, I'm working on the squeak packages. It's not going to be
trivial since the packages are named differently. My plan is going to be
to file for removal of the current packages and then upload the new ones
before Feature Freeze. The sticky point is going to be how to handle
upgrades. The packages are just completely different. The image storage
location is different, the start scripts are different, etc. I can't
really see any sane way of providing for a smooth upgrade. Is there some
way we can just "start clean"?

Finally, I'm uploading now a new version of edubuntu-menus that should
work again and not cause problems. Previously, the edubuntu-menus
Xsession.d script set XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to /usr/share/edubuntu-menus/,
basically diverting the menu reading there. The nasty side effect was
that the system XDG_CONFIG_DIRS, /etc/xdg/ *also* contains stuff other
than menus, such as autostart scripts. What I've changed is to set
XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=/usr/share/edubuntu-menus/:/etc/xdg/. However, we are
still missing a GUI for editing the menus. alacarte by itself won't work
quite right as our menuing is a bit funky. So should we right a wrapper
GUI to call alacarte and clean up after it?

-Jordan