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

[Carol Farlow Lerche]

How does the Mozilla add-on functionality decide if there is a version or
platform conflict for browser add-ons?  it must be a piece of the browser
that does this via some interaction with data on the server.  Shouldn't
there be a similar process here?  It is frustrating to download something
(which can be a problem with bad/intermittent connectivity)  only to find
that you can't use it.



On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 9:12 AM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>



-- 
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
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