[Sugar-devel] How to start the Browse activity from my own activity?

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 00:39, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
>  >>> sys.path.append("/home/olpc/Activities/Browse.activity")
>  >>> import webactivity
>
>  >> So it works only on the XO ... interesting.
>
>  > Yes, that was curious.  Has nobody noticed it not working on SoaS
>  > or anything else?
>
> For Wikibrowse under Sugar 0.82, we asked the activity registry where
> Browse was installed and added that path, but in 0.84 that registry
> was removed without a replacement API being offered, so the only way I
> could see to get it working was the ugly XO-specific thing.  Removing
> APIs that are in use without fixing up activities that use them is not
> very cool.  :/

Back then, the whole sugar-toolkit API was considered unstable. The
registry was there just because it was used by both the journal and
the shell. When the journal was moved into the shell process, it was
removed.

But anyway, you have one activity depending on the internal code of
another activity, that could even be absent from the system. The
authors of the Wikibrowse activity should knew that they depended on
really bad hacks and shouldn't expect their activity to work across
releases without at least talking to the platform developers.

Also, the platform developers have asked for comments about moving the
Browse code they depend on to sugar-toolkit, which would be the right
solution for Wikibrowse and other use cases such as Kandid, but that
discussion went nowhere for lack of interest.

Regards,

Tomeu