[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] [SLOBS] Long-term support for Sugar

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>> What could be achieved with the .xo bundles that couldn't be achieved
>> with an rpm?
>
> Let's not talk about .xo.  ".xo" is just the JAR bundle format.
>
> What can you do with JAR that you can't do with RPM?
>
> 1.  Produce them easily on any platform.
> 2.  Tell the unpacked manifest at a glance without unpacking.

I have possible solutions to both those problems,

> 3.  Be sure that no untrusted code needs to be run to perform the
> installation.
>
> There are many more things, mostly related to the dramatic simplicity of JAR.
>
> I don't understand how switching bundle formats for Activities would win
> us anything.

It the short term it doesn't. In the long term with the XO-2 running
on a completely different architecture there are a lot of wins for
something like rpm and a lot of down sides to a basic system like
simple bundles mainly when it includes binary code.

Peter