Release Notes¶
0.17 (unreleased)¶
This is a draft of what will be released. Notes are not fully accurate or final.
Deprecations / removals¶
Note
These deprecations are harmless if you installed KA Lite using an installer and only relevant in these cases:
- You run a specialized setup or deployment
- Your deployment is 1½+ years old
- You’re a KA Lite developer
- (List of removed commands)
kalitectl.py
has been removed, instead we invokekalite.__main__
frombin/kalite
.bin/kalite
now only spawns a new python2 interpreter in case it’s called by python3.- The bundled
requests
library is now version 2.1.1 #5263 - All files distributed as “data files” in
/usr/share/kalite
(or similar location) has been removed. It is all located as “package data”, meaning that several upgrade issues are fixed moving forwards. - The parts of
kalite.testing
application that were related to benchmarks. These commands have been unmaintained and are outdated. Now the application’s sole focus is utilities for CI. - The whole
kalite.basetests
application has been removed. It was used to do nonsensical tests of the host system, not actual unit or functional testing. kalite.updates.management.commands.classes
moved so it doesn’t show up as a commandclasses
.python-packages/fle_utils/build
, unused build utility from 2013.- The
manage.py
script has been removed from the source tree (usebin/kalite manage <command>
instead.) - When running KA Lite straight from source, we used some very legacy convetions for data locations. But you can achieve the same effect by specifying a non-default locations using the
KALITE_HOME
environment variable. Example:KALITE_HOME=/path/to/.kalite kalite start
. - PyRun is no longer supported, code that pertained its lacking
multiprocessing
has been removed. - Static files are only served by Django’s HTTP server in
DEBUG=True
mode. It was already handled by Cherrypy in other cases, and WSGI deployments are now required to implement this behavior. - We no longer release sdists (tar.gz) on PyPi, instead only .whl. #5299
Command cleanup¶
In 0.17, we cleaned up a lot of unused/broken/deprecated commands, #5211.
In case you are using any of them (we hope not), you will have to pay attention that the following management commands have been removed:
kalite manage gitmigrate
kalite manage katest
kalite manage initdconfig
kalite manage nginxconfig
kalite manage apacheconfig
kalite manage todolist
kalite manage i18nize_templates
kalite manage benchmark
kalite manage createmodel
kalite manage modifymodel
kalite manage readmodel
kalite manage runcode
kalite manage unpack_asessment_zip
kalite manage create_dummy_language_pack
kalite manage generate_blacklist
kalite manage compileymltojson
Bug fixes¶
- Forward admin user to Manage tab after device registration #4622
- Fixed unreliable BDD test #5270
- Cleaned up deprecated settings
CONTENT_DATA_PATH
andCONTENT_DATA_URL
#4813- Added PyPy support by not spawning a new interpreter #3399 #4315
- Upgrades from 0.15 on a Windows system broke video download #5263
- Release .whl format on PyPi, it installs faster, it’s the future. Users will no longer be warned about Wheel incompatibilities when installing from Pip. #5299
Known issues¶
- Windows installer tray application option “Run on start” does not work see learningequality/installers#106
- Installing on Windows 8, 32bit is reported to take ~1 hour before eventually finishing.
- Development: Selenium tests on Firefox 48+ needs the new geckodriver and the new Selenium 3 beta
pip install selenium --pre --upgrade
0.16.9¶
Bug fixes¶
Known issues¶
- Windows installer tray application option “Run on start” does not work see learningequality/installers#106
- Writing to
server.log
is disabled on Windows #5057- Installing on Windows 8, 32bit is reported to take ~1 hour before eventually finishing.
- If you are upgrading from 0.15 on a Windows system, you have to manually locate
python-packages\requests
, typically inC:\Python27\share\kalite\python-packages\requests
and delete it (after completing the installation process). Otherwise video download breaks. #5263
Paper cuts
- Old versions of
pip
installer breaks because ofrequests
library downgrade. #5264- Exercise “Measure area with unit squares” is broken #5130
- VTT Subtitles are broken in Epiphany browser #5125
- Viewing subtitles on Ubuntu requires ubuntu-restricted-extras #4993
- Individual Student Progress Report may take a long time to load #5106
- Button “Show Keypad” may be missing on some exercises due to upstream data API issue #5103
0.16.8¶
Bug fixes¶
Known issues¶
- Windows installer tray application option “Run on start” does not work see learningequality/installers#106
- Learner is not notified of mastery level, exercises keep displaying #4875
- Writing to
server.log
is disabled on Windows #5057- Installing on Windows 8, 32bit is reported to take ~1 hour before eventually finishing.
Paper cuts
- Exercise “Measure area with unit squares” is broken #5130
- VTT Subtitles are broken in Epiphany browser #5125
- Viewing subtitles on Ubuntu requires ubuntu-restricted-extras #4993
- Individual Student Progress Report may take a long time to load #5106
- Button “Show Keypad” may be missing on some exercises due to upstream data API issue #5103
0.16.7¶
Bug fixes¶
- Restore learner stats: Correctly display login count and aggregate login durations (previously uncollected data!) #5157
- Mastery percentage wrongly displayed on learner stats page #5181
- Speed up content scanning for up to 10x speedup when scanning big video directories, meaning content scanning drops from hours to minutes #5201
- Lockdown fix for user logins #5202
- Initial “pragma” support for SQLite and setting
CONTENT_DB_SQLITE_PRAGMAS
. Use this to improve performance, such as allocating more memory for caching. Peewee docs. #5225- Put max-height CSS rule on navbar logo #5206
- Submit correct HTTP
user-agent
for learningequality.org stats #5226- Broken legacy assessment item download fixed (affects mainly some Debian packages) #5214
- Fix automatic CI tests so they now run (development issue, not related to deployments) #5201
- Added automatic coverage reports (development issue, not related to deployments) #5230
- Running
setup
command as root will give a warning + prompt, because we don’t advice running as root. #5032- Docs updates: Tested and updated Apache/Nginx WSGI guide, updated PPA setup to work on Debian/Raspbian
- Content packs: Added ~1700 dubbed videos in Non-English versions of the content packs, populating content databases and thus adding language support for: Burmese, Indonesian, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil, Xhosa, Zulu. content-pack-maker#28. #5120
Known issues¶
- Mac OSX installer version (based on pyrun) crashes #5211 - will be fixed in 0.16.8
- Windows installer tray application option “Run on start” does not work see learningequality/installers#106
- Learner is not notified of mastery level, exercises keep displaying #4875
- Writing to
server.log
is disabled on Windows #5057- Exercise “Measure area with unit squares” is broken #5130
- VTT Subtitles are broken in Epiphany browser #5125
- Viewing subtitles on Ubuntu requires ubuntu-restricted-extras #4993
- Individual Student Progress Report may take a long time to load #5106
- Button “Show Keypad” may be missing on some exercises due to upstream data API issue #5103
- Installing on Windows 8, 32bit is reported to take ~1 hour before eventually finishing.
0.16.6¶
Bug fixes¶
- Content packs updated, bulk of broken exercises fixed and all languages rebuilt (and should be re-downloaded), pay attention to a couple of known issues!
- Allow logins during LOCKDOWN #5117
- Remove RPI warning message about max number of concurrent downloads, there’s no longer a limit on small platforms #4982
- Make ROOT_DATA_PATH consider the KALITE_DIR environment variable #5143
- Restore downloading on RPI w/ m2crypto: Unbundle requests and use requests.get instead of urllib.urlretrieve #5138
- Docs: Add warning message on KA Lite windows application docs #5137
- Treat socket.error as if no server is running #5135
- Docs: Connect to ka-lite on IRC #ka-lite (Freenode) - #5127
- Notify student when all exercises in a series are completed (level has been mastered) #4875
- Use current year in parts of footer #5112
- Handle socket.error: Fix some cases where KA Lite fails to start due to a previous unclean shutdown #5132
- Content packs 1800 outdated questions (assessment items) inside exercises (English version) used to cause problems due to their widgets and have been removed - not only by KA Lite, but also on KhanAcademy.org. This does not affect the number of exercises and there are still 29,839 assessment items left, so it’s not a big concern! #5131
Known issues¶
Please note that issues with content packs are not related to the software itself but are being fixed and updated along side our release.
Watch individual issues on Github or dev@learningequality.org for announcements and updates.
- Content packs ~1700 dubbed videos are missing in Non-English versions of the content packs, making the following languages have empty content databases: Burmese, Indonesian, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil, Xhosa, Zulu. These issues can be tracked in content-pack-maker#28. #5120
- Learner is not notified of mastery level, exercises keep displaying #4875
- Login counts and session times in Learner progress reports are wrong #5157
- Browsers on Windows XP are experiencing issues with SVG images #5140
- Exercise “Measure area with unit squares” is broken #5130
- VTT Subtitles are broken in Epiphany browser #5125
- Viewing subtitles on Ubuntu requires ubuntu-restricted-extras #4993
- Individual Student Progress Report may take a long time to load #5106
- Button “Show Keypad” may be missing on some exercises due to upstream data API issue #5103
- Writing to server.log is disabled on Windows #5057
0.16.4¶
0.16.1¶
0.16.0¶
General¶
- KA Lite is officially supported on OSX 10.11 (El Capitan).
- We’ve revamped the language packs into a new format, called content packs. This results in significantly faster startup times across the board.
Warning
You will have to redownload all your languages to fully support 0.16.
- We introduced a new beta inline help system. Check this out by going to the Facility management page and clicking “Show me how!”
- A lot of UI tweaks and bugfixes. KA Lite is now more stable than ever!
0.15.0¶
General¶
Python 2.6 is no longer supported. It may still work, but we are no longer actively supporting it. Other known issues:
- The latest OSX version (EL Capitan) is not yet supported. KA Lite is officially supported on OS X 10.8 - 10.10.
- On OSX, you must restart the server after downloading videos in order for them to be marked as available.
- On all platforms, you must restart the server after downloading a language pack in order to use it.
- You can no longer configure your server using
local_settings.py
. Instead, custom settings must appear insettings.py
in the user’s.kalite
directory.
0.14.0¶
General¶
Installation from source (using git
) is no longer supported.
If you have previously installed from source, in order to upgrade you must first install KA Lite again in a new location using one of the supported installers.
Then you can migrate your database and content from your old installation to your new one using the command:
kalite manage setup --git-migrate=/path/to/your/old/installation/ka-lite
You must use the kalite
command that comes with your new installation.
The path you should specify is the base project directory – it should contain the kalite
directory, which should in turn contain the database
directory.
Follow the on-screen prompts to complete the migration. You should then no longer use the old installation, and should consider deleting it.
0.13.0¶
General¶
Interacting with the system through kalite/manage.py
has now been deprecated. Please use the kalite executable under the bin/
folder. Run bin/kalite -h
for more details.
If you are pulling the source from git, you will need to run the setup command to complete the upgrade. From the base directory run:
bin/kalite manage setup
On Windows, use the bin\windows\kalite.bat
in the cmd.exe prompt:
bin\windows\kalite.bat manage setup
When you are asked whether or not to delete your database, you should choose to keep your database! You will also be prompted to download an assessment items package, or to specify the location if you have already downloaded it. If you wish to download the package and specify the location during the setup process:
- Download the assessment items package here. Save it in the same folder as the setup script.
- During the setup process you will see the prompt “Do you wish to download the assessment items package now?”. Type “no” and press enter to continue.
- You will then see the prompt “Have you already downloaded the assessment items package?”. Type “yes” and press enter.
- Finally, you will see a prompt that begins with “Please enter the filename of the assessment items package you have downloaded”. A recommened file may appear in parentheses – if this is the file you downloaded, then press enter. Otherwise, enter the name of the file you downloaded. (Absolute paths are okay, as are paths relative to the directory you are running the setup script from.)
Windows¶
Warning
Internet Explorer 8 is no longer supported in this version. Please use a newer browser, or stick to version 0.12 to maintain compatibility.
Raspberry Pi¶
If you’re updating a current Raspberry Pi installation, make sure to put this in your local_settings.py
to avoid slow performance:
DO_NOT_RELOAD_CONTENT_CACHE_AT_STARTUP = True