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

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 11:13 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.)
>

It may be interesting to factor in localization (eg: translation of
the description, etc) into this discussion. We already translate parts
of activity.info so it may be trivial to extend the mechanism.
However, it does increase the workload on translators a bit, and we
need to agree on which fields to translate (for example, if we have a
non-UI-visible field called category or tags, it may not make sense to
translate it).

It may also be worthwhile to keep some kind of compatibility with the
desktop-entry spec
http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/, in case
we add support for standalone activities in the future.

Thanks,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]