J5’s Blog

I got my first taste of Sugar today, the software platform being developed for the OLPC project. I was testing out some locking patches in D-Bus and they had an issue with the updates in Fedora so I decided to give it a spin to see if I couldn’t shake some bugs out of D-Bus. I must say the enviornment was simple to setup requiring me to run these few commands:

git-clone git://dev.laptop.org/sugar-jhbuild
cd sugar-jhbuild
./sugar-jhbuild build
./sugar-jhbuild run


I ran into a few issues such as gnome-python not being in the module set but it was all easy to fix. Git was really nice for generating a patch which I sent back to the devs. It took all of 10 minutes to compile the 17 or so modules and I was off and running. The devs really put some work into getting a nice envionment to hack in. I simply went around poking in python files to try and fix the issues. In the end it came down to not inializing threads that was causing problems. I did find a bug in D-Bus where a pending call mutex was being initalized to NULL instead of the dummy mutex which I haven’t been able to track down yet. In any case it was easy enough to jump into and was really helpful in identifying bugs in D-Bus along with giving me ideas on where the python bindgings should go next.