[Sugar-devel] Bundling plugins with Browse

[Morgan Collett]

On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 21:49, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
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> On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 08:34:29PM +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>>On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 07:50:17PM +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>>>>I haven't done these tricks myself, but I know that some activities
>>>>ship executables and libraries inside their bundles.
>>>>
>>>>Two places to look at are modifying PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH and
>>>>insert in them paths inside the bundle.
>>>
>>> Please make such hacks optional, to ease integration with
>>> distributions, that often mandate the use of shared libraries.
>>
>>Sure, the idea here is to be able to fix a bug in the OLPC distro
>>without having to respin images.
>>
>>Distros shouldn't resort to these hacks ever, but deployers may find it
>>handy in some cases.
>
> Is this not about writing an add-on to the Browse activity, providing a
> new functionality: embedded PDF viewer?
>
> If so, then why do that as a "dirty hack"? I see a use for such add-on
> more widely than just by the OLPC distro.
>
> Sorry if I (still) misunderstand the issue here.
>
>
>  - Jonas

My understanding is that the new feature has system dependencies, and
to avoid the necessity of installing those on the OLPC, the .xo file
that will be made available to the control panel software updater on
build 767 will include the necessary dependencies as binaries in the
.xo itself. The XO build can update activity versions, but not rpm
packages (without root command line access). For OLPC to push out a
change to system packages, they need to produce a new build, which
requires substantial resources - and then they need to get people to
upgrade/reflash to that build. It's much simpler to do a hack in the
.xo.

The feature in Browse in the tarball release will not need to contain
those binaries, and distributions can simply add the required
dependencies in the packaging.

Regards
Morgan