[Sugar-devel] The ARM is near

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Tomeu Vizoso<tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> Yeah, I guess Jonas' suggestion of promoting platform independent
>> bundles as "first class" addresses this concern.
> 
> +1
> 
>> I personally don't think we are going to be able to outdo rpms nor
>> debs so the less binary code we have the better.
> 
> Agreed. One thing we _could_ do, without getting into the whole mess,
> is to have a 'requires' metadata that gives the Sugar shell some
> hints.
> 
> The shell can then
> 
>  - attempt to install rpm/debs to satisfy the req's... if it can
> (dependent on sudo access, network access, and the collaboration of
> the underlying pkg manager)

This doesn't solve the problem.  Packages on the same arch, with the same
name, ostensibly representing the same version of the same software, will
often have substantially different ABI in different distros due to the
choice of compile-time options.

Even ignoring this phenomenon, different distros ship different versions
of underlying libraries.  If your dependency is too recent, the user can't
acquire it, and so can't run your code.  If your dependency is too old,
the version on this distro may have an API break that breaks your application.

We cannot solve our problem by relying on the distros, unless we want
every Activity to be repackaged and retested separately for every version
of every distro.  My goal is to make Activity bundles universal across
Sugar.  The only way to do this is to control the dependency chain
ourselves, outside of the distro.

--Ben

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