[Sugar-devel] discussion about dropping the emulator from the sugar package...

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 11:38 AM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7 May 2013 09:46, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de> wrote:
>>
>> The reasoning for that change are all ok.
>>
>> I am wondering the following: who is using 'sugar-emulator' at the moment
>> on Fedora (or possibly other distributions)?
>>
>> I think a developer can use 'sugar-build' fine those days for his needs.
>> It is well supported and solid, and the dependencies you need to install are
>> the same, just that the sugar repos are built on the machine. For a
>> developer this setup makes sense imho.
>>
>> The other use case is someone who wants to try out Sugar under GNOME. For
>> him having to install the sugar packages including the emulator and then
>> having a nice icon to start it from is a great thing to have. He does not
>> have to log into Sugar from his session manager.
>>
>> If we think the latter is a use case we want to support, we should package
>> sugar-runner. I would do it in a separate package for the reasoning Daniel
>> described in his initial mail [1]: "A separate module make sense here
>> because most users will never run this code. It's largely a collection of
>> hacks which are not necessary when running as a normal desktop environment."
>
>
> Taking a bit of a step back, I think it's important to mention that
> sugar-runner (or sugar-emulator) are not quite the ideal technical solution
> for the try-out case. I mean, running one session inside the other is hacky,
> tricky and is just getting harder with stuff like systemd. For that use case
> you'd ideally just make it easier to run another gdm session in parallel, so
> that sugar gets its own full session and just works.

That's the way we do it by default.

> With that in mind, I think the best upstream can do is to keep maintaining
> sugar-runner separately from sugar-build, so that *if* distributions want
> they might continue to include it.

There are (were?) users of it because when it has broken in the past
I've had a number of complaints. I have no idea who the users are and
why they choose this use case or even if they still use it that way.

Peter