[sugar] packaging Sugar

[Dan Williams]

On Sat, 2007-03-31 at 15:11 +0300, Jani Monoses wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I have started making Ubuntu Feisty packages for sugar and its dependencies
> and came up with a few questions in the process.
> 
> 1) Versioning : there's a VERSION and a RELEASE number in the build-snapshot
> scripts of artwork and sugar. I am not sure what RELEASE stands for, I thought
> I'd simply use VERSION for the debian package.
> 
> 2) Copyrights and authorship:
> There are Red Hat, Inc. and OLPC copyright statements throughout the code but not
> in all files. (For instance hippo-canvas has none, so I just used Red Hat)
> The AUTHORS files are empty so I added Marco for the time being as he commited the most
> in sugar and the artwork.

Yes, I've noticed this too and we need to fix it by adding the copyright
notices to all files that don't have them.

> 3) Artwork:
> Would the tarball be not better named sugar-artwork instead of olpc-artwork? I think
> it would be more suggestive as a package name. Only needs a change in configure.in and
> build-snapshot.sh AFAICS. I filed a ticket to make it install the gtk engine where
> the other engines are: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1194
> 
> 4) Sugar:
> I see the dist tarball installs both pyc and pyo files and they seem to be the same.
> 
> In jhbuild sugar depends on libabiword even though only two activities need it
> (write and develop) and not the framework itself. This does not affect packaging though.
> 
> I thought of making a sugar package (the framework) and a sugar-emulator one (probably
> just that script). As for the existing core activities I am not sure which way would be best.
> -make one sugar-base-activities package with the existing ones that have no large deps
> -package the same ones along with the sugar framework itself thus avoiding API skews.
> -one deb per activity (overkill IMHO)
> 
> Are there foreseeable changes in the API which could make a release of current sugar with Ubuntu
> undesirable, for instance an incompatible change that would make activities written two months from
> not be unusable on feisty. Packages would still have the value of getting started quick with Sugar
> development with no jhbuild though.

Quite definitely.  That's been one of the reasons to _not_ package up
sugar and put it in distros, because it's changing so rapidly.  An
example is the PresenceService framework which we'll integrate in the
next week or two, the journal will get it's APIs fleshed out, and the
clipboard may be more evolved as well.

What we don't want is to create a situation where, because a certain
version of Sugar is in a distro, that activity authors start writing
activities for it even though it's now two or three weeks old.  We're
not going to break API just because we feel like it, because that makes
people's lives harder, but there are _no_ API guarantees at this time.

> I'll need to figure out how to use the system avahi and network manager as there may be some overlap
> in what dbus services sugar provides in this area.

Not really; we use NM and Avahi with Sugar on our laptops all the time.
It will Just Work.  We may start using more NM features and we'll likely
move to NM 0.7 later this spring too.  That's going to mean that either
you'll need NM 0.7 in your distro, or something else will have to be
figured out.

So back to the reason we're using jhbuild and not packages in distros;
it's all due to the amount of churn and the fact that Sugar needs the
latest CVS/SVN/etc versions of a lot of external dependencies.  That may
make the ongoing  maintenance of Sugar in a distribution more effort
than it's work _right now_.  In the longer term, of course we want
distro packages.

Dan

> Right now hippocanvas is packaged and in the archives, and the system matchbox applied two fixes
> from svn so it works well with Sugar. As abiword 2.5 is unstable I am not sure I'll package it for
> feisty especially since conflicts with the existing 2.4 install may arise, and I'd rather leave this
> to the original Debian maintainers of Abiword.
> 
> thanks
> Jani
> 
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