[Sugar-devel] sugar-meeting notes today

[James Cameron]

There doesn't seem to be a relationship between what you have said and
the mailing list thread that you've posted to.  Please check again for
relevance and make the connection clearer.

However, to address one of your points; you said an activity is to
supply its own dependent packages in the bundle.

False.

An activity does not have to supply its own dependent packages in the
bundle.

There are a set of dependent packages provided by the Sugar Platform
Stack which an activity author should not bundle.  These are called
the Platform Components and are listed on the Wiki for versions 0.88
to to 0.96 of Sugar, after which the list was no longer maintained.

https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.96/Platform_Components

Since the GsoC team are building a Raspberry Pi image with Debian, the
platform components are not declared, and must be resolved by hand, or
as a result of binary package dependencies declared by the Debian
source packages.

Also, when Fedora developers package an activity, or Debian developers
package an activity, or when OLPC do so for their Ubuntu system, the
bundled dependencies are stripped and discarded, and distribution
dependencies are declared in the packaging metadata.

Of the problems I cited, only the IRC activity was affected by
dependencies; and that was because the Debian package is IRC-8 from
2010, but the latest is IRC-12 from 2015.  The platform component was
Python, which removed simplejson and replaced it with json.  Gonzalo
fixed this in 2014, but the Debian package has not taken the fix.
Bundling Python into the activity would be a costly solution to a
trivial problem.  I don't think we need the IRC activity, I mentioned
it only because it was one of the four available but not yet included.

In the thread, where you saw me refer to sugar-NAME-activity, that is
a reference to the Debian package for the Sugar activity NAME.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/