[sugar] penguintv progress on sugar

[Christopher Blizzard]

Owen Williams wrote:
> I've been adapting my RSS aggregator PenguinTV for use in Sugar.  My
> goal is to have one codebase that can serve as both a regular GNOME
> application and an OLPC activity, and that the program can adapt itself
> at runtime depending on the environment.

That's a pretty agressive goal. :D  I would love it if you would be able 
to take the time to document what you had to do to make that happen.

> Right now I can autodetect gconf, lucene, and gstreamer, and change
> behavior based on whether these exist or not.  For instance, if I don't
> have gconf I store all my settings in my sqlite database.
> 
> I've attached a screenshot of what penguintv looks like under sugar at
> the moment.  There are some theme bugs, like black text on the dark
> toolbar and ugly icons, but I assume that will be fixed later.

It's a little ugly but not bad at all considering you're just getting 
started.  :D

> Right now the biggest problem I have is that pycurl is not available on
> olpc, and I'll have to figure out how to bundle it with my application.
> It's a small library but is extremely important for downloading large
> files over the internet.  It supports http redirects and resume, and
> there's nothing in the gnome stack that provides this functionality
> transparently.
> 
> It would also be nice to have pyLucene available on the platform, but
> it's not necessary.

This is an example of where we end up with a bundles vs. rpms 
discussion.  Are 60% of the apps on the machine going to use that 
functionality?  Are 80%?  Is it critical functionality that's required 
on the laptop or is it something that _has_ to be installed in system 
directories?  Where do you draw the line between a cost that everyone 
has to pay to support a certain subset of apps?

Just as a measurement, how big is the on disk footprint of pycurl?  (We 
don't have that in extras, which I find shocking considering how useful 
it's been to me in the past as well.)  How about pyLucene?

> 
> Otherwise, the program is working fine.  There's really not a big
> difference between a regular GNOME environment and sugar.  All I have to
> pay attention to is that I don't have a GnomeApp window to work with.
> But other than that, gtk is gtk :)

That it is.  We were pretty explicit up front that we're going to 
include all of Gtk.  There was some discussion of "subsetting" at the 
embedded GNOME conference, but I think that we should include all of Gtk.

--Chris