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

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:44, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 6. Ease of creation of activity packages
>>>> Moving to distro-based packaging will not effect the difficulty of
>>>> developing activities, since packaging is something you do after
>>>> development, not before.
>>>> It will affect packaging and distribution. My suggested model (as
>>>> employed all over the open source world) is that the developers would
>>>> release source distributions and let distributions do the packaging
>>>> and distribution.
>>>> Even though a Sugar system with distro-installed packages is crippled
>>>> (activities cannot be erased or updated through any realistic means),
>>>> we've *already* found some great packagers from Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora
>>>> and SUSE who have been distributing activity packages.
>>>> In many cases it will be enough just to point out to distros that
>>>> you've developed an awesome new activity, but maybe in some cases we
>>>> will have to lend a hand to those distributions in order to get things
>>>> packaged up. However, there are also a huge amount of people with
>>>> packaging expertise who are keen to help. Over the last few years I
>>>> have personally dabbled in packaging for Gentoo, Fedora and Ubuntu.
>>>> I'm far from an expert in any and have had to ask various questions
>>>> every single time, but all of my problems have been quickly solved by
>>>> other people more experienced than myself. There is also a huge amount
>>>> of documentation available. This is the distributions core business -
>>>> they like to package good things, and they are good at doing so.
>>>> It is indeed an increase in difficulty of packaging (for the
>>>> situations where developers will have a role in packaging, which will
>>>> hopefully be less and less), but it also allows us to hand this off to
>>>> other people (or at least access a huge amount of expertise), and it
>>>> does represent an increase in the quality of our processes and a
>>>> solution to some problems.
>>>
>>> I have a possible solution to this which would allow automatic
>>> creation of rpms. I need to get time to sit down and see if this is
>>> going to work which I don't think I'll get until late Oct at the
>>> earliest but it should get us to a point where a Activity is tagged in
>>> git and a while later a rpm in available in a repository. I'll post
>>> more once I get the time to test my theory. If its proven it will
>>> basically remove the arguement of "rpms are too hard for the
>>> developers to make and they don't have the time to do so".
>>
>> But we also have activity authors that don't want to go through the
>> hassle of learning git :/
>
> This is getting completely ridiculous. So how do they manage the
> versions and releases of their packages? Do these get put on a.sl.o?
> If so how do we verify the source code and whether it can be
> distributed? How do we verify any binary content they might include?
> What they do privately is their own business but if it appears on
> a.sl.o it needs to be verify able and trackable. There needs to be a
> minimum set of requirements.

In these cases, I don't expect those activities to contain binary
code. Also, I don't think ASLO is intended to be the only way to
distribute activities.

I'm personally ok with ASLO containing only activities with code in
public repositories, etc.

>> And even worse, we want people who are not yet able to create
>> activities from scratch to do simple modifications to existing
>> activities and redistribute them.
>
> That's fine. Its open source and it then becomes their problem but it
> shouldn't be a central issue what they want to do with modified
> activities. The activities hosted on a.sl.o should meet a minimum
> requirement. Otherwise we get into a situation where there's no
> guarantee of the Activity whether that been the source or the
> stability of it.

Agreed.

Regards,

Tomeu

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«Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
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