[Sugar-devel] sugar-pippy dependencies

[Aleksey Lim]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 04:10:39PM -0400, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> El Tue, 29-09-2009 a las 12:36 +0000, Aleksey Lim escribió:
> > pygame and numpy are parts of Sugar Platform[1], at least for 0.84,
> > so, the right question is should these pakcages be a part of SP-0.86
> > I guess +1 for both, since we have honey activities that are depend on
> > these packages.
> 
> In Sugar shell 0.82, the only thing that numpy was providing was a bit
> matrix.  In 0.82, we replaced it with faster and lighter C code in
> sugar-base, and it was a big performance win.
> 
> I suspect the #1 usecase for numpy is to compensate for lack of good
> array support in Python.
> 
> 
> Questions:
> 
> 1) are there lighter-weight alternatives for the most popular uses of
> numpy?
> 
> 1) how many of the existing activities actually depend on numpy?

In my case, ~60 ASLO's activities:
* Measure
* Speak(and Memorize since it has Speak's code)
* olpcgames(FoodForce2, story-builder, falabracman, Maze)

> 2) would it be hard to remove this dependency from them?

Not sure about 0.86(we need, at least, fix existed activities) and
I'm not sure at all about activities that are out of ASLO.

> 3) Should we define a policy for deprecating components of the Sugar
> Platform in new revisions?  All evolving standards need to find a
> balance between new features with old feature removal to avoid unbounded
> bloat.

Thats a good idea anyway, policies for inclusion/exclusion components
from/to SP, so we have first precedent..

> 4) Even if numpy is going to stay around for the Sugar Platform, could
> we remove it from Pippy and other core activities to save resources and
> allow shipping lighter weight live distros?

In case if have numpy in Pippy, in my mind it doesn't make much sense in
having two Pippies:
* developers(and experienced users) are aware of such things(and they don't
  need Pyppy installed from packages - in most cases they don't use
  Pippy at all or use git repo).
* end users, in most cases, will use sugar-platform meta package thus
  will have numpy anyway

-- 
Aleksey