[Sugar-devel] The ARM is near

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Benjamin M.
Schwartz<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> 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.

Fedora doesn't have x11vnc because it uses tigervnc which is a fork
based on tinyvnc (I think) which is massively optimised over the
original vnc. So why is that not usable? The problem with providing
copies of things like statically linked applications is that they are
then not open to the usual security updates etc. I would have thought
that gtk-vnc-python would be completely unusable in Fedora without
some form of VNC in Fedora so if x11vnx wasn't there it must have been
replaced with something else.

yum list *vnc* will show you that there's a whole collection of vnc packages.

Peter