Preferred end user 3rd party app installation method

[Mike C. Fletcher]

sbspammagnet at aol.com wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> A few application installation questions as I'm not clear how much
> of the documentation in the wiki actually works at the moment and
> how much is intended to work:
AFAIK at the moment all activity installation is manual.
> How does an end user install third party written C based applications
> today? (i.e. is there a GUI/device insertion triggered method or do you
> have to do it from a shell?)
At the moment, the shell is required AFAIK.
> If, for example, we have an application on a USB memory key and we
> would like it to auto install when the key is inserted or better still 
> (for
> our application) run from directly from the key, is there a mechanism
> to do this?
>  
> To actually get the application to show up in Sugar do we have to
> wrap the application with an activity which contains a python
> bundle referenced by something like 'class=MyCAppBootstrap' that then
> bootstraps the C app or can we reference the application directly using
> 'class=MyCApp' or perhaps 'exec=MyCApp'?
You can *almost* get an application to work just by specifying an exec.  
The application will start (I just tried this with the Inkscape SVG 
illustrator running on an emulated developer system, it should work the 
same on a real laptop), but Sugar uses a number of dbus messages to 
track the state of each activity.  Because your C application won't 
respond to those messages Sugar will "lose track" of the application and 
won't know to hide the frame or show the application in its activities 
view or otherwise continue to manage it once it is started.

We'll likely want to fix that so that Sugar doesn't *rely* on the dbus 
responses to track the applications.  That should be a straightforward 
change AFAICS.

HTH,
Mike

-- 
________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com