[sugar] 9.1 proposal: View source key everywhere

[pgf at laptop.org]

tomeu -- excellent!  thanks for helping make progress on this.

tomeu wrote:
 > http://dev.laptop.org/~tomeu/viewsource.py
 > 
 > This approach has a good thing that is that works everywhere, but has
 > a major problem: doesn't let activities override it and handle
 > themselves the view source key event. This is very bad for activities
 > like Etoys, the ones produced by Pippy or activities that would prefer
 > to display the source code for the _content_ loaded in that moment
 > (Browse).

the ultimate fallback would simply be a URL, with which Browse
could take you to a (hopefully friendly) source browser on the
web somewhere -- to browse CVS or git, for instance, or even just
to an upstream program-specific website where more information is
available.

as you implied, flexibility is the key.

 > Alternative 1: Move it to sugar-toolkit, would be available to all
 > python activities, and activities would be able to override it easily.
 > Inconvenient: non-python activities wouldn't benefit from it.
 > 
 > Alternative 2: Add a mechanism for the shell to know if an activity
 > wishes to provide its own view source window. It could be done by
 > adding one more D-Bus method or by adding one more property to
 > activity.info. Inconvenient: adds complexity to activity development.

an addition to activity.info, with sensible defaults, would be the
best bet, i think.  default behaviors could include going to bundled
source, as you've implemented, and/or using the "activity_source" URL
that many activities provide on the download page on the wiki.

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org