[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Proposal: Contol-Panel packaging

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 2:51 AM, Jerry Vonau <jvonau at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Hi All:
>
> I would like to propose a feature for discussion and inclusion in the
> 0.98 cycle is packaging all control-panel applets as rpms. As this
> discussion does not impact the UI and more of a packaging issue I'm an
> not creating a Features page. The discussion can take place here on the
> mailing-list.
>
> The reasoning is that it should make it easier for downstream users of
> sugar to exclude applets that don't apply to their use case without
> having to patch them out. For example OLPC removes via their .spec file,
> the keyboard and updater applets from their builds and uses their own
> version of an updater supplied as an rpm.
>
> Dextrose is using this idea to now to partly split up the what is
> available to install at rpm generation time[1]. I have found this useful
> from a deployment perspective by being able to exclude applets that are
> unwanted or need further development from the final image.
>
> The current code base and workflow would not be changed, except a
> revised sugar.spec file would generate more that just the sugar rpm when
> run, like how it is done now for sugar-emulator. Deployment level users
> of sugar would then need to state which applets to include in their
> image at image creation time. This will allow development of applets to
> evolve without having to reinstall all of sugar in the field for a
> change to an applet.
>
> Any XO specific user tool like "About my Computer" and "Power" should
> not really be part of sugar but should be available to install on demand
> like OLPC's sugar-update-control and olpc-switch-desktop that are added
> to OLPC's sugar installation. SoaS might benefit from not shipping all
> the applets, omitting the ones that apply to XO hardware.
>
> This change might help development of new features in the control-panel
> area that later be incorporated into sugar once proven to work.
>
> Feedback and comments welcome,

I've pushed this and it will appear in the next build, feedback welcome.

I've left the AboutComputer and AboutMe built in and all the rest are
sub packages. There's a meta-package called sugar-cp-all which pulls
all the Control Panels packages in as well.

Sorry about the delay.

Peter