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

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 17:36, Eben Eliason <eben.eliason at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Hmm, I was hoping that displaying the tags would help people know what
to search for.

Regards,

Tomeu


> 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]
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> «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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>>
>



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