[sugar] setup.py

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 11:55 -0400, Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Mar 2007, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> 
> > Well the final user story should me more like:
> >
> > 1 John hack BlockParty using the Develop activity.
> > 2 John share it on the network
> > 3 Greg see the activity and want to join it
> > 4 Greg fetch the activity from John (automatically)
> > 5 Greg and John plays
> >
> > No setup.py involved there...
> >
> > Right now it's more like:
> >
> > 1 John hack Blockparty.
> > 2 John run setup.py dist
> > 3 John put the .xo somewhere on the web
> > 4 Greg download Blockparty from there.
> >
> > I think generating a .xo will continue to be useful in the future. And
> > maybe we will still need a way to do it from the command line, but the
> > main way to do should be Develop.
> >
> > Marco
> 
> OK, so for somebody creating an activity from scratch, right now, today... 
> should they even be creating setup.py in their activity bundle? 

Yep

>  Is there 
> one stock setup.py that always works?

Yep, it's just a couple of lines:

from sugar.activity import bundlebuilder
bundlebuilder.start()


>   Are there differences between one 
> setup.py and another?

Not right now.

>   My diffs say no -- and if that's the case, why have 
> a different setup.py for every activity?
> 

It might be useful to allow people to customize the behavior in the .py,
similarly to what dist utils does. I'm not a big fan of doing that kind
of thing in python though. We will see.

The idea about bundle building/packaging is that we define the format
but we encourage the community to come with build systems that better
suits their needs. The current bundle builder (which is used in
setup.py) is really really basic.

> And also -- are we assuming that all activities in the future will be 
> written using Develop?

I hope so, it would mean we have a rocking Develop activity :)

But I think the approach should the same as with build system. We define
a common ground (the activity API, the bundle format) but we allow the
community to come up with different development tools.

Marco