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

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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

I would use such hints only as inspiration for Debian packaging, not 
rely on it.

The reason for this is that I would not expect upstream software authors 
to know all the nitty gritty details of policies governing Debian 
packaging - e.g. how we name the dependencies.  Even if they did know 
better than me I still would need to double-check, as ultimately I am 
responsible for the quality of packaging that I maintain, not upstream.

Since the hints most likely won't be machine-processed (I suspect other 
distributors will do as me - it seems irresponsible to me to automate), 
I strongly recommend to use the de-facto GNU filenames: INSTALL for 
notes relevant only at install time (i.e. both for manual install and 
for distributors) and README for hints targeted end-users.



>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.)

I guess you meant _downstream_ interest above.  Distributors are 
downstream to Sugarlabs, only GTK+, Python and similar are upstream, and 
I suspect that's not the ones gaining interest in Sugar.


Kind regards,

  - Jonas

-- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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