[Sugar-devel] [Feature] activity.info enhancements

[Walter Bender]

Summary: It would facilitate the packaging of Sugar activities into
RPMs and DEBs if there were additional information available in the
activity.info file.

Details: In walking the process of creating an RPM of one of my
activities with Sebastian Dziallas, who is doing lots of packaging for
Fedora and SoaS, we observed that many fields in packages' .spec files
could readily be pulled from the activity.info file. A few additional
fields would be necessary, such as the following:

    * a short summary
    * an URL to the source package
    * an URL to the activity home page
    * the required dependencies to run

None of these additional fields are particularly onerous for an
activity developer to provide and it would enable the creation of a
script (as part of setup.py/bundlebuilder.py) to do most of the work
in creating the .spec file. (I assume .deb has similar requirements to
.rpm). Things are more complex for activities that include binaries
and the like, but for the most part, we should be able to greatly
facilitate upstream maintenance of our code while asking little more
of Sugar developers. None of these additional fields need be required,
but their inclusion would make things easier. (This is not a new idea,
but one that seems timely given all the upstream interest in Sugar
these days.)

See:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Feature_ActivityInfo

-walter
-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org