[K12OSN] SchoolTool Installation/Possible Inclusion with K12LTSP

[Tom Hoffman]

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 12:33:05 -0500, David Trask
<dtrask at vcs.u52.k12.me.us> wrote:
> "Support list for opensource software in schools." <k12osn at redhat.com> on
> Wednesday, March 16, 2005 at 12:13 PM +0000 wrote:
> >With the recent discussion of a sort of future partnership with Ubuntu
> >and the Mark ShuttleWorth foundation, could this possibly be included as
> >a built-in software with K12LTSP in a future release?

That's the plan.

> >It has quite a few dependancies from what I notice all in source and
> >takes quite awhile to install, and very criptic for a beginner.  I have
> >a school (and depending on the results possibly more) interested in
> >using this to manage their school.  However after making the suggestion
> >to install it he is having some trouble getting it installed.

Actually, we have a new release as of yesterday called SchoolBell 1.0
which is _much_ simpler to install.

First off, I should explain that "SchoolBell" is essentially
SchoolTool's group/organization calendaring functionality without any
school-specific references.  All subsequent versions of SchoolTool
will be based on the SchoolBell 1.0 code.  The SchoolTool 0.x line is
an evolutionary dead end, so I strongly urge you to download
SchoolBell 1.0 from http://schooltool.org/schoolbell  We hope to have
ported our school-specific calendaring functionality to the new
platform in about six weeks.

Here's the explanation for the changes.  SchoolTool's architecture was
designed over a year ago by Steve Alexander with Zope 3 in mind, but
Zope 3 (which is a complete rewrite of Zope 2, the only Zope you're
likely to have interacted with) wasn't done, and nobody could
guarantee when it would be done, so the compromise approach was to use
stable parts of Zope 3 with other pieces cobbled together from other
projects, leading to the somewhat complex dependencies of the previous
versions of SchoolTool.

Zope 3 is now stable enough to use, and we've decided to move the
existing functionality over to Zope 3, starting with the calendaring
functionality, since we'd like to have something usable as quickly as
possible.  From your point of view, this isn't such a bad thing,
because the earlier SchoolTool versions tended to have lots of
functionality and not much usability, which was off-putting for
obvious reasons.  Now we're starting from a simpler, more usable,
genuinely functional base, and functionality will be added
incrementally.  It'll be much easier to keep track of the progressive
development of SchoolTool.

The delays caused by this whole approach have been annoying, but we're
extremely excited about the power that Zope 3 can lend to SchoolTool.

I've posted some more documentation on the SchoolBell page and will be
adding more (for the rest of my life, I think).  For SchoolBell 1.0
the  only dependency is a current Python.  There might be a coupe
other Python RPM's that are part of the standard Python distribution
but not in the core Python RPM, depending on how they do the
packaging.  Now that the SB 1.0 tarball is out we'll have to get Eric
going on the RPM binary, at which point installation will be that much
easier.

> In addition....Tom Hoffman...one of the guys with SchoolTool will be a
> presenter at the Northeast Linux Symposium
> (http://www.trasksinc.com/NELS)  He'll be giving at least a mini-session
> on SchoolTool


I'm looking forward to meeting many of you in Maine.  It'll be my
first opportunity to talk with a group of open-source oriented ed tech
people about SchoolTool (other than when I talk to myself) and I hope
to get lots of ideas and insight.

Tom Hoffman
SchoolTool project manager