Activity depends on Fedora-packaged binary code

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Asheesh Laroia wrote:

>> This is my understanding.  As long as it's just one library, it isn't a 
>> big problem.  I have a friend who is packaging 5MB of Mono libraries for 
>> an activity written in C#.
> 
> That person is still your friend? (-;

Shhht!  He may hear us ;-)


> Right.  Let me note here that apt is flexible on packaging formats in the 
> backend, as apt4rpm has shown.  There's no need to reinvent it, and I 
> think there are some stealth Debian fans sometimes hiding in 1CC....

Not very well hidden, actually: it's no secret we have a full
port of Debian installable on the laptop.

I'd agree on using apt to get 50% of the work done.  And then
we could use .deb (or rpm, for what I care) to do the rest of
the work.

I was told the xo bundle format was invented under the assumption
that most developers would have  been using Windows, and a very
basic zip archive with a manifest inside would have been easier
for them to work with.

Instead, it turns out that people now ask for specialized packaging
tools to automate the process of creating manifests.  For some kinds
of bundles such as the library, with many small files, writing the
manifest manually would have been impossible, so some degree of
automation is already starting to appear.

If we're going to develop a toolset, then we could have as well
ported rpm (or dpkg) to Windows or use the already existing ports
in Cygwin.

Someone, I think Dennis, wrote an xo -> rpm converter.  And an
xo -> deb converter would be equally easy.  This is necessary
if we want to package popular Sugar activities for traditional
Linux distros, where using two different package systems would
be crazy.

Oh, my... I can't remember why it wasn't crazy for us, too...


> Well, libraptor is clearly not a "system library" since it's not 
> installed! (-:

And anyway, I see no clear distintion between "system" and "user"
libraries on Linux.  We don't have a freaking system registry.

-- 
 \___/
 |___|   Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \___\  One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/