schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

SchoolTool 1.4 packages for Lucid are now available from our Launchpad PPA.

Installation instructions are the same as for Karmic.

Add ppa:schooltool-owners/ppa to your software sources.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install schooltool-2009 (or
equivalent using Synaptic or Ubuntu Software Center).

The same packages will be pushed to Karmic shortly, so in this case
you will not have to update to Lucid to get the latest package.

Detailed release notes here:
http://book.schooltool.org/htmlhelp/1.4-release-notes.html

90,000 Foot Narrative Release Notes by me:

SchoolTool 1.2, which came out with Ubuntu Karmic, was a heavy feature
release.  We crammed as much new stuff in as we could.  Thus
SchoolTool 1.4 necessarily was a stability focused release.  There are
a lot of small changes that came from direct user feedback (esp. Jeff
Elkner using the gradebook and some friends in China doing a detailed
analysis of SchoolTool).

One major addition under the hood is "security descriptions."
SchoolTool has a sophisticated security model we designed to meet the
unique needs of schools.  For example, by US law, access to most data
about a student has to be limited to people who are either defined by
their role in the school, e.g., school administrators; by a direct
relationship to the student, e.g., their advisor or counselor; or by a
group to person relationship, e.g., the instructor of a section which
the student is a member of.  SchoolTool can now do all that.

Unfortunately, by 1.2, we could do all that, but there was no easy way
for me or anybody else to check exactly what permissions were actually
implemented in the system, so confirming that the permissions were set
up the way you need or expect was nearly impossible.  Now, if you log
in as manager and go to Manage > Access Control > View Access Rights,
you get a detailed human-readable (as much as we could manage) report
of who has permission to do what in the system (screenshot attached).
This isn't a casual read, but it is aimed at the systems administrator
who needs to confirm that SchoolTool conforms to his or her local
requirements.

The Interventions module was a late addition to 1.2.  This was
developed with and initially for Science Leadership Academy in
Philadelphia.  It was added to 1.2 in pretty much the form that they
use it.  As such, it "worked," but only in one very specific workflow
which wasn't well integrated with the rest of SchoolTool.  We've made
many additions to Interventions to make it more generally useful to
SchoolTool users and will be documenting and promoting it more
prominently going forward.

Because 1.2 was new feature heavy, and in the end a little rushed, we
updated the Karmic packages throughout the past six months to clear up
the issues that cropped up.  Going forward, we are moving away from
that approach.  That is, there will only be bugfixes pushed to the 1.4
packages in Lucid and Karmic.

We will probably create a separate PPA for the development packages
for Maverick.  These will be used to push improvements to our grant
pilot sites and other people wanting the latest and greatest, and then
will become the stable 1.6 release in Maverick in October.  To upgrade
from 1.4 to 1.6 will require upgrading from Lucid to Maverick.  This
will help ensure that users of the 1.4 stable branch aren't surprised
one morning by changes that confuse them or their users, or, god
forbid, introduce new bugs.

Many thanks to all our contributors and developers, especially to
Gediminas Paulauskas for packaging and release management.  It is more
complicated than you can imagine.

--Tom

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