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

[Eben Eliason]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 17:18, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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).
>
> I was thinking of displaying these tags in the activity list (or it's
> already happening, not sure). Also, if we allow searching for those,
> we would need to do so with the ones in the local language.

I think displaying them in the list might just add visual noise, but
their primary intent is to allow searching, and as you point out, it's
critical to have good translations for that to work.

Eben


> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> 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]
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>
>
>
> --
> «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
> What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
> Farning
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