Documenting Broken things Sucks (You know it's going away...)


Finishing the tutorial handout draft (only 17 pages at the moment)... or at least, I would be if I weren't obsessing about the wasted effort of documenting the current Telepathy API access. Fact is, it's just plain broken under current OLPCGames. It's just way too fragile to have new devs having to know which thread the callback is executing in. They should be in the Pygame thread, with the rest of your code... but they are not.

There are a number of ways we could fix it or work around it, but I haven't got the time to implement them. So for now I'm having to document the overly complex and hard-to-follow (for newer programmers) rules on when/where you can do what.

I'm expecting we're getting close to 2.5 hours in the tutorial (with 1/2 hour at the start on general introduction, what to work on and the like). I'm seriously considering de-emphasizing the Telepathy stuff to a sub-topic in which we will discuss and explore the Productive model, but we won't attempt to create one ourselves (because it's basically not ready for prime time yet). I'd really rather put the time into fixing the issue (I even started coding a little module to do that), rather than documenting it, to be frank.

Anyway, still have the "further considerations" section at the end to write. It's pretty straightforward, store/restore, handling other GTK events, portability concerns and the like. Guess I'll work on that and then revisit the issue of Telepathy.

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