[Sugar-devel] A Better ASLO

[Tony Anderson]

As I understood the original Sugar Activities, each activity was to 
satisfy in the .xo bundle any
dependencies not satisfied by the system build. For example, GeoGebra 
includes the required JRE.

This approach requires different .xo bundles for the XO-1 and XO-1.5 and 
for the XO-1.75 and XO-4.

The proposed alternative apparently is to install these dependencies 
(binary files) in the build (at build-time or post-build). This has the 
problem that every XO would have JRE installed even if the GeoGebra 
activity was not.

The Java activity offers another alternative - using a Sugar activity to 
install the JRE dependency. However, while the activity claims to be 
compatible with 0.100, there is no mention of whether it works with 
XO-1.75 or XO-4. The implication is that it has both binary versions and 
knows at the Python level which to install. I haven't checked this directly.

In addition to TuxMath and TuxPaint, the GCompris activities (100+) 
depend on a binary core. The Learn activity as well as OLE Nepal's 
EPaath and Pustakalaya activities depend on Firefox installed
as a binary.

I am not familiar with Sugar Network in detail, but it appears to offer 
an enhanced installation technique in which the binary dependency is 
installed dynamically with the xo bundle. If so, this
would be a good solution. However, ASLO and activity developers will 
need to know how to identify these dependencies and ensure the 
appropriate binary packages are available to ASLO.

While .rpm may be a part of the solution, it seems overly restrictive. 
Installing Firefox from an rpm bundle may result in installing an 
obsolete version. It is not clear that binary components are dependent 
on a distribution (GCompris, for example). Use of rpms could restrict 
Sugar even more to a Fedora environment or require again multiple 
versions of an xo bundle.

Tony

On 04/27/2014 06:24 PM, Jerry Vonau wrote:
>>> OK, I might not be on the same page, but are you talking about
>>> > >>activities
>>> > >>with different builds for different sugar versions?
>>> > >>
>> > >
>> > >Think what Tony is referring to above are the versions of TuxMath &
>> > >TuxPaint that are used in AU but require the underlying rpms to be
>> > >present
>> > >before the activity is usable. This would preclude the use in ASLO as
>> > >all
>> > >the dependencies may not be present in the OS and are not provided in
>> > >the
>> > >activity. To have these newer versions effective in ASLO sugar would
>> > >need a
>> > >way to install the needed underlying libraries(as rpms) but there is
>> > >presently no way of doing this automatically right now and there looks
>> > >to
>> > >be no effort to add this support(1).
> >
> >
> >If someone is willing to work on this problem, I am confident it would
> >be accepted upstream.
> >
> >-walter