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

[Aleksey Lim]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 12:43:56PM -0500, Walter Bender 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

Having such info could be really messy,
various distors have various naming schemes, some programs could be
splited to several packages etc. If it will be formal info why do not
just use regular README/INSTALL/etc files, it it will be formal info,
why invent another packaging scheme instead of reusing existed(e.g.
0install as was proposed in [1]).

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Zero_Install_integration

> 
> 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
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-- 
Aleksey