[Sugar-devel] Mode of distribution of Sugar Activities

[sugar at radii.dev]

Hello Srevin,

Yes, currently there is no single source of python3 activities (hence the asov4). But even after asolv4 is ready, there will be a gap between submitting activities for publication and approved activities being added to aslov4.

I think bundling activities as .xo file is the first step most developers do. Some of the activities are than are than packaged as distro specific packages (deb, rpm etc.) and submitted to distros to be added in their repositories. This allows installing activities natively like `# apt install sugar-browse-activity` . Shaan Subbaiah is currently working with Debian but I do not know if he submits packages as well. Maybe you can try yourself to submit your package to Debian and Fedora but its not straight forward and getting accepted is difficult, they have a rigorous quality standard including package should be reasonably free from bugs and should not interfere/modify other packages upon installation.

Activities on demo website are from Tony Anderson's repo <https://github.com/tony37/Sugaractivities/tree/master/activities> https://github.com/tony37/Sugaractivities/tree/master/activities . These are old and mostly python2 based. Currently prototype of aslov4 with python3 activities is available at http://dev.laptop.org/pub/us/activities/focal/ but I do not think it is meant for wider use and currently has only few activities as you can see from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/us/activities/focal/js/index.js .

As for, aslov4, it seems to be a lot smaller project than I expected (unless I am proved to be wrong, which is usually the case with every programming project). It should be completed in less than a month. Currently I am busy, so most likely, there will be very little progress until July.But you can head over to wiki https://github.com/free-libre-software/sugarappstore/wiki to find what needs to be done. Maybe you can implement some of the features. I will try to  push a broad test for generator part. So that if you work on it, you can work more confidently, knowing that changes you make won't create any regressions and compare changes using 'diff' between test output and actual output (change test output accordingly, if change is not regression but intended).

Regards,
Manish


May 31, 2020, 22:00 by srevin03 at gmail.com:

> Hello, hope all are doing well
>
> While reading the sugarlabs wiki, I had come across > packages.sugarlabs.org <http://packages.sugarlabs.org>>  which seemed to work before, but at the moment, I could not connect to it
> As long a the aslov4 is only under construction, I faced a confusion on where is the right place to submit new activities. 
> On sugar-docs (GitHub), there is a small instance of uploading the .xo of a python2 compatible activity however. Unfortunately, I failed in finding a proper guide to "How to publish a sugar activity'. I had previously seen in some discussions on IRC, but however the last known reference to the > packages.sugarlabs.org <http://packages.sugarlabs.org>>  is here > https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/4786>  during GCI 2014. I can also see that, as we have a lot of a activities not only on GitHub, that is, on gitorious, etc. So I coud not find a curated list of sugarlabs' activities listed except on the work by @radii (aslov4),
>
> Can anyone guide me, so that I (or someone who is interested) can update the public wiki with the same information
>
> Few more links that confused me:
> * > downloads.sugarlabs.org <http://downloads.sugarlabs.org>
> * > people.sugarlabs.org <http://people.sugarlabs.org>
>
> Has distribution of activities turned into Linux Distribution specific binaries like .deb and .rpms, or are (*.xo) bundles' still used for public activity distribution (other than OLPC OS?); This also leads to another question, i.e if most activities are packaged in .xo's or only (.deb, .rpm, flatpak)
>
> Thanks
> V/r
> Srevin Saju
>

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