[Sugar-devel] The ARM is near

[Martin Langhoff]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Benjamin M.
Schwartz<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>>  - 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.

Ben -- you are not understanding. Of course, Sugar Shell then asks the
_distro_ tools to satisfy the requirements (PackageKit may be a good
abstraction, otherwise a bit of glue to drive yum and apt might be
needed).

The core of what I am saying is: right now, Sugar Shell offers no
services in this regard. It should, so that

 - activity authors don't write their own yum/apt/pk wrappers

 - 'activity needs X', 'installing', 'we're not online, try later?',
'something went wrong' messages are handled by common Sugar code

> We cannot solve our problem by relying on the distros

We can _only_ rely on distros, and help them do things better.

> 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.

You are going to end up writing your own package mgmt, and your own
community of packagers. Your own build infra for many arches. Fun fun
fun!

It's 2009, we don't write CMSs or package mgmt systems from scratch no more :-)



m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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