[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] addons.sugarlabs.org is starting to work

[Wade Brainerd]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 6:15 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:

> A long time ago, when using bundles was decided as necessary, the idea
> was that there would be something called the "Sugar platform" that
> would specify every component that an activity author can rely on
> being available for their activities to use.
>
> That would include etoys, csound, pygame, glibc, gtk, and any other
> components on which the sugar shell may not depend but activities can
> expect to be there.


I've been part of this discussion a couple of times now and to me it seems
like the original vision is pretty much the right way to go.  As an activity
author I love the simplicity of activity bundles just being ZIP files.


> Everything on which an activity depends and isn't part of the platform
> should be bundled inside the .xo.


Aside from this point!  Some dependencies are simply too complex to bundle,
and can introduce conflicts with the host system.

Aleksey proposed adding a simple "depencencies" line to activity.info.  This
would be parsed by Sugar in a distribution specific manner by a running
'sugar-check-dependencies' script that could be provided by each
distribution.  We would define our own set of dependency names and manually
map them to each distro that we package for.

For example, a 3D activity which used OpenGL could list "dependencies =
opengl", and then the various distributions could handle that as needed in
the script.

If the system does not contain the required dependencies for an activity, in
my opinion Sugar should prompt the user to install the dependencies and then
not launch the activity.

Best,
Wade
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