[Sugar-devel] Abandoning sugar-emulator

[Daniel Narvaez]

Hello,

after we branch, I propose we drop the emulator code from sugar in
favor of a separate module, sugar-runner.

In terms of features the advantages of sugar-runner are:

* It can run inside another X session (with Xephyr like
sugar-emulator), inside a full independent X session and headless,
inside Xvfb.
* It works around Xephyr issues like international keyboards and
multiple outputs.
* It's better tested with recent sugar code and recent distributions.
* It tries to be helpful. For example it offers to tweak
Xwrapper.config where necessary.
* It's integrated with sugar-build and at the same time it can run the
sugar instance installed in the system.
* It's a separate module which I think make sense here because most
users will never run this code and it's largely a collection of hacks
which are not necessary when running as a normal desktop environment.
* From a quick read of the sugar-emulator code I don't see anything
missing, except maybe the ability to specify a scaling. I could easily
add it but... that thing should disapper from sugar anyway!

The code is here:

http://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-runner/sugar-runner/trees/master

There is not that much of it, all python with a few C helpers
(accessed by introspection) where I couldn't avoid it.

-- 
Daniel Narvaez