[Sugar-devel] .rpms vs .xos for Activity packaging

[luke at faraone.cc]

On 1/12/09, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 10:43:01PM -0500, luke at faraone.cc wrote:
>> On 1/11/09, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > Some thought after reading
>> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sugar_on_Fedora:_RPMs_or_.xos%3F
>> >
>> > Maybe instead of choosing one format for activities just add to
>> > activity.info dependency in common/distro-unbinded notation:
>> >
>> > - Activity's author package code in .xo format with dependency string
>> > like
>> >   'Requires = pygtk' in activity.info
>> > - user downloads .xo and pass it to distro-specific installer;
>> >   installer translates dependency from distro-unbinded notation to
>> > native
>> >   package name and pass it to package manager;
>> >   and install activity itself.
>>
>> Something to consider: different distros will have different package
>> naming conventions and versioning. We might want to encorage using the
>> fedora dep conventions and look into how the "alien" package handles
>> this.
>
> You missed my main purpose: activity author should not known about variety
> of
> GNU/Linux distros, his behaviour should be very straightforward - after
> including 'import pygame' to .py, please include 'Requires = pygame' to
> activity.info. The whole dependencies mess in proper distro should be work
> out
> by distro-specific installer

That'd be a huge amount of work unless we had some standard for naming.

We could use the already-existing python egg package format... which
already has dep handling and is cross platform. Was that already
considered?

-of