[Sugar-devel] How to deploy the webactivity libraries

[Simon Schampijer]

On 05/29/2013 08:17 PM, Daniel Narvaez wrote:
> Since I'm the one proposing the implementation, and I'm actually not too
> keen about the idea itself, let me take a step back before I get blamed for
> it forever :)
>
> My feeling is that we should *not* implement this for 0.100 but rather
> consider (very carefully) if it's something we need in one of the next
> iterations. Cutting on philosophical considerations, I think we are not
> going to be able to provide anything like a stable API for 0.100, for
> several reasons including
>
> * We are all too new to this game.
> * The time is short and we are not seeing activities being developed yet.
> * The web platform is a moving target.
> * I have the feeling stable API on html+css+js might be harder than on
> traditional interfaces.
>
> Without a stable API, system libraries are just going to cause more issues
> then benefits, with activities randomly breaking because the library is too
> new or too old.

So you mean for now, we should just add a copy of sugar-web library into 
each activity bundle. And then in the next step deal with the packaging 
of sugar-web as a dependency?

On the packaging end this means that for the next release the packaging 
of the core will not change at all (sugar, sugar-toolkit-gtk3...). Only 
the webactivities need to be packaged and those contain sugar-web.

I think this would be a good compromise for now, given that things are 
in flux. And in the html+css+js world things seem to change fast, let's 
see which package management will survive the next months [1]. Maybe 
volo is gone by then.

About activity development: we should shape the API while we develop 
activities. I am starting with that process now. The more people doing 
that the better, as now we can change API quickly. Of course for a 
developer this means a rather flux environment.

Regards,
    Simon

[1] 
https://wibblycode.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/the-state-of-javascript-package-management/