[kde-edu]: keduca status, .edu file format

[Mathieu Roy]

Hello,

Several months ago, I started using keduca to make some tests.

I needed the ability split a big list of questions into a smaller set, I wrote 
a small script to do that
https://gna.org/projects/keduca-shrinker/

Recently, I obtained an updated version of keduca. 

First, from now on, between each question there's a few seconds to wait before 
the next one show up (and I mean it happens however powerful is the 
computer).

Worse, the file format is not somehow binary, so my script shuffling the XML 
file is broken also. I tried to gunzip and bunzip2 the file without success.

I understand why one would like to encrypt the test files. It could be useful 
to distribute tests without giving up the answer, useful in a educational 
context.
However, first this approach without leaving the possibility of unencrypted 
files is a problem to whoever would like to parse keduca files for any other 
reason, second this approach is broken by design security wise.
Anybody that played to online game like Starcraft definitely knows that the 
only way to secure data is to work with a client/server model where the 
client does not know what he is not supposed to know. In other words, if 
keduca was to be used to make real tests, with real student with real grades 
involved, it would surely have to be composed of clients asking to provide 
the questions to the server but that would not in any way have access to the 
valid answers until the servers knows the test is finished and the score 
recorded.

Considering
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-edu-devel&m=113028149220421&w=2
I assume that keduca is quite dead for now.

I think I have no other option that fetching previous release packages to get 
something that works decently and to hope that future releases will take into 
account these issues.

However imperfect was keduca, it is clearly very useful to have such software. 
In my opinion, such tests are not really great to evaluate students knowledge 
(quite dumb, in fact, as it does not really shows any major abilities apart 
from memory) but they are definitely great to train yourself to memorize 
things.

Regards,

-- 
Mathieu Roy

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