[Sugar-devel] The ARM is near

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Martin Langhoff wrote:
> 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).

I think I am understanding.  My claim is that different distros are
sufficiently dissimilar that we would end up needing a different bundle
for every distro.  The dependencies, even if they have the same name, do
not provide the same API on different distros.

>> 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.

No. I am proposing to "bless" an existing multiplatform distribution, and
then use this distro as an overlay over the base operating system.  Gentoo
Prefix happens to be the only existing distro of which I'm aware that is
designed to be installed without root privileges, but others should also
be considered.

I am advocating this approach in part because it also solves the "Case 2"
problem, of dealing with new Activities written in (platform-independent)
C.  These activities can be bundled as SRPMs, ebuild+tarball, or whatever
the appropriate packaged-source format is for the blessed distribution.

--Ben

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