[Sugar-devel] Activity bundles reformation

[Aleksey Lim]

Hi all,

I hope we are moving forward.

On Oversight Board meeting was chosen strategic decision about
supporting non Sugar Platform based activities [1] which should mean
that we can have activities on ASLO that will depend not only on regular
sugar components but also on dependencies like Java, Qt etc.

This also mean we need to reform deployment method of sugar activities.
Existed practice is fully bundled activities (which should be preserved
for activities that depend only on SP) does not work well for non SP
dependencies when .xo author doesn't know in advance will these
dependencies exist in users environment or not.

So, the question is how we will properly handle issue with (not)existing
non SP dependencies on users boxes. There is also related question (also
critical for keeping ASLO in reliable state) about having binaries in
regular .xo bundles (I hope they will still exists in new scheme), in
most cases such binaries are non SP dependencies, in the rest cases they
could be (like Colors! C based component) thus lets keep .xo out of blobs.

I guess it will be useful for everyone if will not turn this discussion
to mess thus lets take some formal steps to meet this:

* keep in mind that this reformation is about deployment agnostic
  use case, when we need to support variety of deployments (not only
  pure sugar like OLPC but also variety of GNU/Linux distributions)

* try to keep (only) this thread to discuss differences between proposed
  schemes

* before agitate for some scheme, do (or ask scheme author to do):

  - create feature page using feature template [2]
    to let people read your proposal in quiet w/o falling to furious ml
    discussion

  - create a poll item [3]
    to let people vote for your proposal

  - add vote link to this item on top of wiki page like
    http://idea.olpcorps.net/drupal5/ideatorrent/idea/23#solution-title-<see-html-page-source-for-proper-number>

* announce your proposal to this thread

* do not use this thread (and maybe ml at all) to discuss particular
  scheme between interested in this scheme people and use Talk wiki page
  for particular proposal
  it lets other people track proposal evolution w/o seeking bunch of
  emails

I guess we already have several options (but not ready to discuss, since
previous formal steps were not completed):

  - why existed scheme doesn't work, yup I guess it will be better to
    remind people of advantages following previously mentioned steps

  - bernie's idea of reusing distro efforts

  - 0install based proposal(s)

So, lets start and keep this discussion in productive state.

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2010-03-05#ASLO
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Feature_Template
[3] http://idea.olpcorps.net/drupal5/ideatorrent/idea/23/

-- 
Aleksey