[Sugar-devel] Etoys packaging (was: SugarPlatform-0.84.0 on Mandriva)
Bert Freudenberg
bert at freudenbergs.de
Mon Mar 16 08:29:33 EDT 2009
On 16.03.2009, at 12:45, Aleksey Lim wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 12:11:05PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> One minor issue I see with this packaging is that etoys is
>> technically
>> part of glucose, but you packaged it as part of fructose (as "etoys-
>> activity"). If someone was to only install glucose then another
>> etoys-
>> based activity would not work. (if the whole platform is installed
>> it's
>> fine of course)
>>
>> I think the packaging Gavin did for Fedora is less confusing. He also
>> has one package that provides both etoys and etoys-activity, but the
>> package's name is "etoys". Not sure if the Fedora glucose package
>> depends on this yet, but it could.
> yup, its my old fault
> but now, changing current behavior means reforming glucose/fructose
> packages in 4(5) repos.
>
> As you mentioned it means nothing for non-tech users(they just install
> meta-package) but has additional pro for tech users - if someone
> develops
> activity(which isn't etoys based) he could save time and not
> downloading ~25M ;)
>
> --
> Aleksey
Well, the major reason not to package it only as "sugar-etoys-
activity" (which is obvious to me but I tend to forget not everyone
knows this):
Etoys does not actually depend on Sugar. It works fine as stand-alone
application. The "sugar-toolkit" dependency should be removed--Etoys
does not use the toolkit but talks to Sugar directly via D-Bus. It
also only mimics the Sugar user interface (and we actually chose to
use the same interface on other platforms too, for easier
documentation).
Instead, you might want to add a menu entry for normal desktop use
(attaching the non-Sugar icon we typically use). And with a bit of
fiddling we also might get the Firefox plugin to work, so kids can
directly view the material at http://squeakland.org/ ...
So an easy solution may be to add another package simply called
"etoys", move everything except the stuff under /usr/share/sugar into
that new package, and make "sugar-etoys-activity" depend on "etoys".
OTOH the Etoys-activity is so small (it really only is a shell script
with icons) that it might make sense to just include it in the "etoys"
package as in Fedora now.
I should mention that the activity and the base package are only
loosely coupled. For most releases of "Etoys-activity" only the NEWS
file changes, because it also lists the changes in the "etoys" base.
Which might be a bad idea in hindsight.
Another point to consider is that some activities (e.g., MIT's Scratch
and OLE Nepal's E-Paath) do not actually depend on Etoys but just on
the squeak-vm package that etoys depends on. I think that distinction
has not been addressed yet (but then I am not even sure if it is
indeed a problem).
Fortunately nothing of this is really urgent - IIRC then Gavin only
chose to stuff the activity into the main etoys package to avoid the
delay inevitably incurred when asking for a new package to get in.
I'm open to discussing all of this, and arranging upstream changes if
this was helpful. Having non-Etoys developers repackaging our stuff is
new territory for us, and I'm actually quite surprised how well you
guys cope ;)
Thanks!
- Bert -
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: etoys.png
Type: image/png
Size: 26161 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20090316/d6de2750/attachment-0001.png
More information about the Sugar-devel
mailing list