[sugar] First time Sugar user's experiences

[Teus Benschop]

Dan Williams wrote:
>> 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.
>
>   
Thanks, I'll look into etoys how they did it, and see if bibledit can be 
made compliant. From what you say this should be possible.

Teus.
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