[Sugar-devel] Sugar on Debian

[Sascha Silbe]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 12:32:13PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:

> Do you mean to say that GConf-DBus is currently used with non-packaged 
> Sugar, or just that it would be a cool idea to do so in the future?
sugar-jhbuild uses GConf-DBus. That's also the reason why I didn't 
encounter the problems Michael had with Rainbow, BTW.

> shell.log contains a single entry saying (in danish, my language) that 
> /home/jonas/.sugar/default/owner.key.pub does not exist.
Can you give the exact error message?
You totally removed ~/.sugar beforehand, right (so it can't contain an 
owner.key.pub with wrong permissions)?

> Xephyr just comes up with a black screen, and after the usual pile of 
> warnings prints a couple of empty lines and then a segfault message 
> (again in danish: Lagersegmentfejl).
Ouch. That's pretty bad.

> Uncommenting all in ~/.sugar/debug there is still only that single 
> line in shell.log but a coredump is provided, coming (according to 
> "file core") from /usr/bin/sugar-session.
sugar-session is a Python script. I haven't been able to print the 
Python stack from gdb since I upgraded to lenny, but maybe that's fixed 
in squeeze? [1] contains instructions for doing so.
Setting the PYTHONVERBOSE env var might be a start (prints out a message 
each time a module is loaded).

> Output includes the following 8 Sugar-related entries:
[...]
OK, seems like gconf works in general. You might try removing those 
settings (sorry, no idea where they are stored) in case some old 
settings irritate Sugar. Please do a backup of the settings first so we 
can reproduce the issue if it's really the cause of your trouble.


>>> This problem have existed for a while now - but noone seems to have 
>>> experienced it beyond me (no bugreports or questions about it on 
>>> mailinglists), which make me suspect that noone use Sugar on Debian 
>>> except me.
>> That is highly likely as 0.82 was only the bare minimum in Debian and 
>> quite buggy in general (in my experience).
> Providing "the bare minimum" ideally should not be a problem, as 
> additional activities can be installed from other sources.
_If_ they can be installed...

> Real problem here is that independently downloaded activities are both 
> system- and architechture-dependent (not even tied to a fixed target 
> like LSB) and .xo packaging format do not hint about environment(s) 
> supported.
True, but there's also a specification [2] of what activities can 
reasonably expect on a Sugar 0.84 installation (at least in theory - 
e.g. espeak is currently not even available in sugar-jhbuild). AFAIK 
this specification is the basis for the "Works with" field on aslo [3].

> That said, The Debian package collection is not a complete Glucose 
> (libraries for Read and Write are missing).
The reasons for this would also cause Read and Write downloaded from 
aslo to fail, so Debian still is "rather minimal". :)

>> I hope that some users will switch from sugar-jhbuild (which is 
>> targeted to developers, not users) to Debian packages now that 0.84 
>> is available.
> Your argument above was that 0.82 in Debian was minimal - so is 0.84.
Sure, but there's hope of improvement. What's the state of the 
Read/Write dependencies in sid, BTW? Do they now provide what we need?

> I hope that some _developers_ will help package Sugar for Debian.
If you mean Sugar core developers (i.e. Tomeu and Simon), then I don't 
think this will happen; AFAICT they are already overloaded. The fact 
that they are helping with Fedora packaging is out of pure necessity for 
getting SoaS to work, not because they see it as part of their work as 
Sugar developers.
Personally I'll be glad to help whenever someone is stuck (like you seem 
to be), but given that I also don't have much time to spare I won't help 
with packaging in the near future (but potentially later). My focus 
currently is to get Sugar to work properly and in a way that's better 
than current systems. Note that I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to 
work on delivering Sugar to users, it's just not my priority right now.
It would be great to have more people working on packaging Sugar for 
distros, but that's probably a Catch-22. My hope is that SoaS will help 
attracting those people (and of course future core developers etc. as 
well).


[1] http://wiki.python.org/moin/DebuggingWithGdb
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.84/Sugar_Platform
[3] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/

CU Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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