[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Gary C Martin]

On 23 Jul 2009, at 18:28, Gary C Martin wrote:

> Just wondering. If I had a USB stick with 2,000 pdf, plain text,
> etext, djvu, epub etc files on it... if they are at least reasonably
> well titled file names (lets say at least title, author), then a child
> can:
>
> 1). pop in the USB stick
> 2). goto the Journal and select the external USB stick icon
> 3). search and/or browse the books by author / title
> 4). any entry they want can be dragged to their Journal icon
> 5). ...or clicking any object entry will both start it for reading and
> copy it into the childs Journal

Just to be clear, this is the behaviour since the data-store (and  
Journal?) re-work from Tomeu. I just ran the same test on an 0.82.1  
release and had some different results:

- I could rename, add tags, favourite and add descriptions; but this  
would appear as a duplicate entry on the stick next time I mounted the  
device. It would fail to start, but the old unchanged version would  
still be listed and would still work. Seem to remember this as an old  
indexing bug and part of the reason for the need to re-work the data- 
store to be robust.

- resuming a pdf from the stick would view it in Read correctly but  
not copy the file over to the local data-store. When closing Read, it  
would then display a "keep error" (likely as the old data-store  
couldn't deal correctly with writing to external media).

So, if you're looking to support deployments unwilling or unable to  
upgrade Sugar (likely a very large slice I'd imagine). This looks like  
you will need to bake your own Activity solution :-(

Random thoughts. Both old and new external media support allows for  
starting an .xo Activity bundle. The Activity is installed and  
started. So you could extend the Get IA Books Activity to have a  
thumbnail view and have it check an external media device for a local  
archive format of some kind. Then just distribute a USB stick with  
the .xo bundle and the local archive of book content. Get IA Books  
Activity could then be launched, if found would default to the local  
archive, then any chosen books would be saved to the Journal.

Both old and new external media also support for hiding files with the  
leading "." (dot) character, so you could potentially hide the archive  
structure from the Journal view to prevent kids from clicking on it,  
just showing them the Get IA Books Activity icon.

One unknown spanner in the works to test for, is what access  
restrictions an Activity might hit trying to arbitrarily read from an  
external media device, haven't had to do this myself.

Regards,
--Gary