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

[Walter Bender]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 8:20 PM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> 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.
>
Yes. Downstream.

I based my proposal on a discussion with only a small sample of
packagers. I take it from both Jonas and Aleksey that there may be
better ways of assisting packagers. The goal is that activity
developers do have a lot of knowledge about their creations and it
would make sense to have them express it in some way that would save
work for others. But what form this expression takes I leave to those
more knowledgeable.

Jonas, it may make sense not to depend on things like dependency
names, etc. but I can imagine things like a summary, description, URL
of the homepage, etc. could be reasonable to accept from developers.

please advise.

-walter

> Kind regards,
>
>  - Jonas
>
> --
> * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
> * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
>
>  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org