[sugar] First time Sugar user's experiences

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 03:42 +0200, Teus Benschop wrote:
> 
> > > Well, hmm, that probably is the case in an ideal world, ideal in the 
> > > sense that software writers are going to stick to Sugar's handling of 
> > > activities. But we're going to use the OLPC for other computing tasks in 
> > > Africa, where the main thing is not gui, but that there is no power. The 
> > >     
> > 
> > That begs the question, why use sugar for these tasks at all then?  Why
> > do you need a GUI if you're just going to be using the command-line for
> > these things?
> > 
> > If you do want a GUI for stuff, it seems like a terrible hack to drop to
> > a terminal for things that users are going to be expected to do quite a
> > bit.  Can you describe your use-case here in a bit more detail?
> >   
> 
> The application I am thinking about, and developing, is Bibledit
> (bibledit.sourceforge.net), an editor in use by Bible translators, who
> often go into areas without power. It is a Gtk application with a GUI,
> but does not conform to the guidelines of Sugar how activities should
> work. For example, it expects stuff in /usr/share/bibledit, and is
> installed normally in /usr/bin. According to the sugar guidelines, it
> should use relative paths for everything. It now stores it's data in
> $HOME/.bibledit, so not a relative path. At present it runs on the
> OLPC, with Sugar and all, but it has to be installed by root to get it
> on. It even copies a library or two to /usr/lib. To get this
> application started, one needs to have a terminal, and type
> "bibledit". A terminal would not be needed if Sugar allows for
> starting binaries by hand, similar to pressing Alt-F2 on Linux. We
> wish to give people this application, but I wonder whether it is worth
> the whole rewrite to make it confirming to an activity. Hence the
> terminal is good to have, just for a start, and we'll see later. And I
> guess that Bibledit is not the only applications that is going to
> start off like that. Sugar still is needed for other tasks, such as
> web browsing. Yes, I agree that ideally Bibledit should become a
> "native" sugar applications, but probably in a later stage.

Ok, that's a good explanation.  Ideally, you could create at least a
_minimal_ wrapper (like etoys has done for squeak) and get a bibledit
icon in sugar itself.  That's not hard.

But for the question of installing stuff on the system, that will
obviously require root, and that's a no-no for now.  You'll have to
figure out a way of putting your libraries into the activity bundle, but
you can likely keep storing information in $HOME somewhere, ideally in
the path provided to you by the functions in sugar.env.

The terminal isn't going away tomorrow, but from your explanation it
seems like needing the terminal is an excuse to not integrate the
activity/application into the OLPC platform, which can quite easily be
done and shouldn't be too much work.

Dan

> Regards,
> 
> Teus.
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