[Sugar-devel] Bundling libraries, RPMs? (was Re: WatchMe-1, a VNC activity)

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Peter,

On 17 Aug 2009, at 21:20, Peter Robinson wrote:

>> In an LTSP environment, no sysadmin is going to choose a policy that
>> allows users to install packages, even trusted packages, to the root
>> system, or otherwise make any sort of modification that cannot be
>> trivially and reliably wiped clean.  PolicyKit will work fine, in  
>> that it
>> will happily enforce the policy, which is "no installation allowed".
>
> In an LTSP environment surely you'd want it all centrally managed by
> an admin so each device/server doesn't end up with 50 copies of
> different versions of the same activity installed. It would be a
> support nightmare, take up massive amounts of extra resources that it
> need not do so and no doubt other issues that I haven't thought of
> like issues with collaboration etc.

The whole point is a learner/teacher can modify any activity at any  
time and then share that modification in a safe, sandboxed way, to  
other Sugar users (and perhaps back to us). No existing packaging  
systems seem to have any concept of this basic Sugar feature/goal :- 
( They all shout root, root, root and have install dependancies  
splattered across the OS like some midnight software massacre :-((

I'd love to see some progress being made here, it's so painful to see  
this dialogue come up month after month (no offence intended).

Apple I think are the closest I've seen, if you app needs some zany  
dependancies then it includes them in it's bundle (just like Sugar  
bundles). For the Mac users, it's just "Drag this application to your  
application folder." Done, end of story. For the worst application  
offenders (and there are some, usually some of the big corps who can  
get away with it) the user is asked for their admin password, but this  
always looks like shoddy, dodgy application development from  
developers who don't really know what they are doing on a Mac.

Regards,
--Gary