[Sugar-devel] Where to fetch activities from for a live build and how to auto-select many?

[James Cameron]

On Sat, Nov 07, 2020 at 09:58:39PM +0000, Martin Guy wrote:
> Hi!
>   For the Sugar Live Build Games or Everything, I'm curently fetching
> Activities from under github.com/sugarlabs editing auto/config to add
> lines like
> 
>     clone https://github.com/sugarlabs/abacus              Abacus.activity

That will work fine for the Fructose set of activities, and many of
the recently maintained activities.  For some activities it won't
work, because the git repository does not contain a single activity
ready to run.  Some repositories contain more than one activity, and
some repositories need extra steps before they are ready to run.

> Should I be fetching these from actiities.sugarlabs.org instead and,
> if so, does anyone know how I- go about that?

activities.sugarlabs.org is used to release activities that run on the
OLPC XO laptops, which run Fedora 18.  There are no more than three
million of these, most likely only a few tens of thousands continue to
function.

You may fetch from activities.sugarlabs.org if you wish, but they are
Python 2 activities, so you must provide Python 2 environment for
Sugar to use.  The .xo files are .zip files, and they can be unpacked
in /usr/share/sugar/activities with a directory name ending in
.activity.

You still need to have tested them.  Many activities, especially those
in activities.sugarlabs.org, have problems that prevent them from
running on a modern Linux.

> Also, if i want to include, say all the Games in an image, or indeed,
> every activity on actiities.sl.o, how would I go about this?

I don't think you'd want to.  It would take you too long to test
them.  But if you download a category, you can use the
four digit plugin number as an identifier for each activity.  The
Python requests module could be handy.

> Thanks if anyone knows

What you're doing is curating a collection.  This is a valuable step,
and you should publish your results somehow.  We don't have a standard
or convention for how to do this, but a list of bundle identifiers
(from the activity/activity.info metadata bundle_id) and versions is a
good start.

When looking for source code for activities, the places to look are;

1.  repositories in the github.com/sugarlabs organisation,

2.  any other branches other than master,

3.  any other developer repositories such as those in
github.com/godiard or github.com/quozl,

4.  activities.sugarlabs.org,

5.  people.sugarlabs.org,

6.  git.sugarlabs.org,

7.  wiki.sugarlabs.org,

8.  wiki.laptop.org,

9.  download.sugarlabs.org/sources,

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