[Sugar-devel] Zero-calorie bundles?

[Bernie Innocenti]

Dear Zero Install developers,

as you may know, Sugar is a learning environment consisting of
educational activities packaged and distributed as "bundles", which are
some kind of glorified zip files.

This design was chosen because we wanted to enable our learners to
participate in the creation of new activities using our stack.
Secondarily, our security model benefits from unprivileged installation.

Unfortunately, our activity bundle format is very limited: no
dependencies, no multi-arch build system, no signature checking, weak
versioning model, no concept of source bundles, and general immaturity
of the toolset. On the other hand, most (but certainly not all) our
activities happen to be simple, "Pure Python" applications with no need
for the complexity of a full-blown packaging discipline. Most of us like
this simplicity and wish to retain it. Nevertheless, now that Sugar runs
on multiple architectures and OSes, these limitations are starting to
chafe.

Zero Install appears to have identified reasonable compromises for many
of these trade-offs. While I'm not yet claiming that z-i would be a
better alternative for us to pick off the shelf, there's certainly a lot
of experience within your community to learn from.

Also, I understand from previous discussions [1] that hosting for
package repositories would be helpful to you. I think we could help out
by sharing our bandwidth and disk space. Sounds like an interaction in
which both sides have something useful to give :)

How about getting together on IRC to exchange ideas regarding packaging
strategies? I'd propose next Saturday @ 1500UTC [2], of course
negotiable.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.zero-install.devel/2753
[2] http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=10&day=17&year=2009&hour=11&min=0&sec=0&p1=43

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/