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

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 09:39:15PM -0500, Walter Bender wrote:
>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.

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

>>> 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.

I certainly agree that sharing such info makes good sense - it only 
worried me if using a machine-readable format as that could create an 
expectation among activity developers of it being used automatically by 
distributors which I wouldn't do myself and recommend against others 
doing either.


>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.

It makes good sense for upstream to clearly express such metadata, but I 
still see it as distribution choice if using it verbatim or not.

As an example, the distributor may have a different interpretation of 
"Homepage" than upstream (as has been discussed before on this list).

If you really want to use a machine-readable format then I recommend 
using DOAP instead of reinventing the wheel.  But even if you do, I 
still recommend to use an INSTALL file as well.



Hope that makes sense.  If not please keep arguing! :-)


  - Jonas

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

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