[Sugar-devel] Etoys packaging (was: SugarPlatform-0.84.0 on Mandriva)

[David Farning]

2009/3/16 Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>:
> 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 ;)

As with most (_all_) open source project, once we got past the
politics of "thou shall not do thing differently than I do" to the
technical considerations, things can move surprisingly fast.

Thanks for you patience!
david

> Thanks!
>
> - Bert -
>
>
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