[Sugar-devel] The ARM is near

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Benjamin M.
> Schwartz<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> That's a strange claim. Can you give me an example? Assuming the
> activity itself is written in Python and uses either binaries or
> python bindings... what big unmanageable API changes would it see?

I agree that python module interfaces tend to be relatively stable, but I
am not concerned exclusively with pure-python activities.

My most recent experience here is with the Watch Me Activity [1].  Watch
Me is just a python wrapper around gtk-vnc-python (the client) and x11vnc
(the server).  gtk-vnc-python is packaged for Fedora, but x11vnc is
written in C and is not in any of the Fedora repositories.  x11vnc is
packaged for Gentoo and Debian Stable, so I'm not sure why Fedora doesn't
have it, but it doesn't, and I wasn't willing to wait a year for x11vnc to
make it into a Fedora release.  Therefore, I decided to include a binary
copy of it in the bundle, so that Watch Me would work on OLPC's 8.2 series.

I was happy to see that the author of x11vnc provides a number of static
binaries [2] for many platforms.  I downloaded the i686 executable [3] and
tested it on an XO.  It didn't run.  It didn't even launch.  Instead, the
dynamic linker gave me an error, due to a mismatch in the version of
/usr/lib/libssl.  The binary wouldn't run, because the version of libssl
on my system was not the same as the one on the system used to compile the
binary, never mind that I'm not making use of any encryption.  I very
nearly gave up entirely at this point

Luckily, the author's i386 executable [4] is "even more" statically
linked.  It appears to include libssl entirely, along with a megabyte of
other dependencies.  This runs on my XO, and is included in WatchMe-2...
but that's no guarantee that it'll run on your Debian system (now with
eglibc!), or even on other versions of Fedora, never mind on x86-64 or ARM.

--Ben

[1] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4205
[2] http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/bins/
[3] http://x11vnc.sourceforge.net/dev/x11vnc-0.9.9_TEST_i686-Linux
[4] http://x11vnc.sourceforge.net/dev/x11vnc-0.9.9_TEST_i386-none-linux

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20090828/fdccebb9/attachment.pgp