[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Proposal: Contol-Panel packaging

[Jerry Vonau]

Hi All:

I would like to propose a feature for discussion and inclusion in the
0.98 cycle is packaging all control-panel applets as rpms. As this
discussion does not impact the UI and more of a packaging issue I'm an
not creating a Features page. The discussion can take place here on the
mailing-list.

The reasoning is that it should make it easier for downstream users of
sugar to exclude applets that don't apply to their use case without
having to patch them out. For example OLPC removes via their .spec file,
the keyboard and updater applets from their builds and uses their own
version of an updater supplied as an rpm.

Dextrose is using this idea to now to partly split up the what is
available to install at rpm generation time[1]. I have found this useful
from a deployment perspective by being able to exclude applets that are
unwanted or need further development from the final image.

The current code base and workflow would not be changed, except a
revised sugar.spec file would generate more that just the sugar rpm when
run, like how it is done now for sugar-emulator. Deployment level users
of sugar would then need to state which applets to include in their
image at image creation time. This will allow development of applets to
evolve without having to reinstall all of sugar in the field for a
change to an applet.

Any XO specific user tool like "About my Computer" and "Power" should
not really be part of sugar but should be available to install on demand
like OLPC's sugar-update-control and olpc-switch-desktop that are added
to OLPC's sugar installation. SoaS might benefit from not shipping all
the applets, omitting the ones that apply to XO hardware.

This change might help development of new features in the control-panel
area that later be incorporated into sugar once proven to work.

Feedback and comments welcome,

Jerry

1.http://git.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/mainline/blobs/bleeding-edge/rpms/sugar/sugar.spec