[IAEP] gcomprise

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 02:46, Samuel Klein<meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Bruno Coudoin <bruno.coudoin at free.fr> wrote:
>
>> Would it be acceptable to ship my activity bundle with symbolic link to
>> the sounds bundles. Potentially these link will be dead unless the voice
>> bundle is installed.
>>
> < If it is, then it's just a matter to create voices bundles and include
>> links in the activity bundle I ship. Very easy I think for me and for
>> the users.
>
> I don't know if current activity style guidelines support this, but
> they should -- as long as the activity catches the error of a deadlink
> and doesn't crash when a desired bundle isn't installed, but is simply
> silent.

Well, the notion of bundle as opposed to a package is an user
experience one: if you are in posession of a bundle and install it,
you will be able to use it. For a package, you may need to install
some dependencies that may not be available to you if you don't have
an internet connection, or if they aren't available any more, or if
you don't know where to get them from, or if you have another package
already installed that is incompatible with the version you need, etc.

Both bundles and packages have drawbacks, and we chose bundles over
packages for activities because we thought that was the less evil
option.

For the GCompris case, I don't see a big problem if an activity it has
a soft dependency on sounds installed in another activity. It will be
a bit confusing for the user if he has to install another activity in
order to get sounds in it, but well.

>> at some point there will be a major need for someone to pick up this
>> work or GCompris will be unmaintained on Sugar.

Agreed, what I would like to see happen is for someone to get to use
some of the GCompris activities in a Sugar deployment. Once those
people see the benefits of GCompris and demand more, we can ask them
to contribute bug reports, help with translation, packaging, etc.

As an example of that, Patricio Acevedo from Uruguay has already
hacked the Chess activity to run in SoaS:

http://patricioacevedo.blogspot.com/2009/06/chess-de-gcompris-en-sugar-on-stick.html

Now that we have a fix documented, the next steps may be having
someone to enter this as a ticket, then someone to contribute a fix
either to upstream GCompris or in the packaged activity in
activities.sl.o.

Regards,

Tomeu

> thanks for your work so far.
> is there a place to add opentasks on the sl wiki?
>
> SJ
>