[Sugar-devel] acti-plications: write once, run anywhere?

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from Erik Blankinship's message of Wed Jan 19 04:21:26 +0100 2011:

> Do all activity and application developers have write access to any part of
> the system where they can add the libraries that they need to the system
> from either gnome or sugar side and then access if from either side?

No, they don't. In the current design, activities are meant to be
self-contained. We also explicitly encourage trying out potentially
untrusted activities, so measures are taken to prevent them from
interfering with the system and each other. I highly recommend adhering
to the restrictions even though they are only enforced on systems using
Rainbow. You can check the low-level activity API description [1] in the
wiki for a list of directories you can rely on being writeable.

As for native packages (rpms, debs, etc.), AFAICT no work has been done
to "sandbox" them in any way, so users need to be very careful about what
packages they install.

I you want to ship your product to schools in the near future and it
needs to be available from the Gnome menu, your best option is to set up
a package repository and let schools add that repository to their package
manager configuration. This has the additional advantage of letting you
ship binaries matching the system (by setting up one repository per
distro version).

In the long run, I'd like to convert the activity.info file into a
regular .desktop file that gets installed to the standard location
[2-4]. "Activity mode" invocation (via Sugar) would use a Sugar-specific
key, "application mode" invocation (e.g. from within Gnome) would use
the standard Exec key. So a single additional line in activity.info
would suffice to make your activity available from within Gnome.

Sascha

[1] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Low-level_Activity_API
[2] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2435
[3] https://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/303/
[4] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec
-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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