[Sugar-devel] Change request: Fix open with API

[Sam P.]

Hi Tony,

I think you have misunderstood the capabilities of the api.

The api does not support launching with uris (which is something to look
into for 108) or "activity ids".

The api supports bundle ids (open a new terminal activity) and object ids
(open this memorize set).  This allows for many of the use cases you
described although being very simple.

Directly using sugar-launch from activity processes is suboptimal, as
activities should not launch child processes (Rainbow security model).
This was discussed when the feature was being implemented.

I do not see why a feature that has some use cases and does not destabilise
the rest of the system should be dropped so late in the cycle.

Thanks,
Sam

On Fri, 3 Jul 2015 3:15 pm Tony Anderson <tony_anderson at usa.net> wrote:

>  As I understand it, the release of 0.106 is to be made on Monday. This
> does not seem to warrant a delay in that release. Moving a capability from
> sugar or sugar3 to the toolkit doesn't imply a visible change to the api as
> seen by an activity developer.
>
> I don't understand the assumption that downloading a file in Browse to the
> Journal implies that the user wants to access it immediately. For example,
> if I download 'War and Peace', I may want to read it when I get the laptop
> home, not in class. For use with the schoolserver, it was necessary to
> patch Browse to download a pdf to the Journal and not load it into a new
> window. I need to do this also for txt books from Rachel. Fortunately,
> Browse downlaods epub directly to the Journal (the format of the Gutenberg
> books in Internet in a Box).
>
> Browse itself is a problem in this scenario. It (along with the Terminal
> activity) is an exception by providing tabs. It would be useful if the
> launch facility would open a new tab and not launch a new instance of
> Browse when it is already running.
>
> Launching activities based on mime_type is already a problem. How is one
> activity to know whether Browse or Etoys or ImageViewer or Paint  wiil
> respond to a
> launch request for an image.
>
>  How is one activity going to determine the activity id (The activity id
> (e.g., 6f7f3acacca87886332f50bdd522d805f0abbf1f) of type STRING as passed
> on the command line
> <http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Low-level_Activity_API#Command_Line_Arguments>)
> of another activity?
>
> Originally, sugar-launch was to pass through options -u (uri) and -o
> (object_id). The version I use does this, so the following code in an
> activity displays an svg:
>
> sugar-launch -u 'file:///home/olpc/Documents/my.svg'
> org.laptop.WebActivity
>
> Similarly, an activity can use the datastore class to get an object_id and
> use the -o option to, in effect, resume an activity from the Journal.
>
> The only 'trick' is to run sugar-launch from the activity. However, this
> works:
>
> from subprocess import call
>
> call('sugar-launch -u 'file:///home/olpc/Documents/my.svg'
> org.laptop.WebActivity', shell=True)
>
> In the context of the GSOC project, it is important that the Web Confusion
> activity be able to pass a specific html file to Browse for use with the
> interactive javascript shell. This capability is satisfied by sugar-launch
> with the -u option. However, sugar-launch uses optparse which is deprecated
> in Python 2.7 so the version I am using now has been modified it to use
> argparse.
>
> Using datastore, an activity can launch, for example, Memorize with a
> specific 'game'. So, for example, a teacher is introducing Roman numerals.
> The 'lesson' activity could resume Memorize from the Journal with a game on
> Roman numerals (previously downloaded from the school server).
>
> It would seem appropriate to keep the release schedule and do some
> rethinking in the use cases for this feature. Sugar-launch launches the
> activity by the command line and so uses Sugar to perform the launch. It
> would be easy to provide this mechanism to an activity avoiding the
> 'subprocess' call (although that is hardly a difficult interface). This new
> feature should at least provide the functionality of sugar-launch.
>
>
> Tony
>
>
>
>
> On 07/02/2015 09:33 PM, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
>
> I found a problem in the implementation of
> "Start_activity_from_another_activity" feature [1]
> Usually, when the programmer want start one activity from another,
> need display in the user interface information about the activity,
> like the name or the icon.
> One example of the use is in Browse activity [2]
>
>  The problem with this is that we are using
>  jarabe.journal.bundlelauncher.get_bundle()
> and that is part of sugar, not the sugar-toolkit.
> We should not use that code in the activities, because is internal to
> Sugar,
> and we don't have any warranty of stability.
>
> I know is very late in the release cycle, but I think is a error ship a
> release
> with a broken API. After that, activity developers need keep compatibility
> with the api provided in the broken release for ever.
> While the developer can add another try catch, is a source of errors,
> and usually difficult to understand for the developer, because the activity
> will work in different ways given the sugar release.
> This feature was introduced in this cycle, would be good if is provided in
> a fine state.
>
>  I prepared prs for sugar [3] and the toolkit [4]
>
>  The change needed in the Browse activity to do the test is only:
>
>   --- a/downloadmanager.py
> +++ b/downloadmanager.py
> @@ -37,8 +37,7 @@ from sugar3.graphics.icon import Icon
>  from sugar3.activity import activity
>
>  try:
> -    from jarabe.journal.bundlelauncher import get_bundle
> -    from sugar3.activity.activity import launch_bundle
> +    from sugar3.activity.activity import launch_bundle, get_bundle
>      _HAS_BUNDLE_LAUNCHER = True
>  except ImportError:
>      _HAS_BUNDLE_LAUNCHER = False
>
>  Take this as a formal request to break the freeze to solve this issue.
>
>  [1]
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Start_activity_from_another_activity
>  [2]
> https://github.com/sugarlabs/browse-activity/commit/7315fe7d9d951965a7ccd6341d9bc684517cbad8
> [3] https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/pull/548
> [4] https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/pull/236
>
>  --
>   Gonzalo Odiard
>
> SugarLabs - Software [for | by] children learning
>
>
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