[sugar] [Proposal] .xot bundles, for translations

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 5:10 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 8:33 PM, Martin Langhoff
> <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What I meant to say is that all the good things we get from a bespoke
>> packaging format, we can get from rpm with a few conventions as to the
>> directories where things land.
>
> A couple of additional notes from a private subthread...
>
> ...there are a few ways to use rpm/yum for unprivileged users
> (alternative DB, fakeroot, relocatable pkgs...), and I think we can
> use them for this. In fact, we could even build a simplistic rpm
> installer in python that handles a subset of what rpm does (hopefully
> this is not needed, it'd detract from the idea quite a bit)
>
> One valid criticism to using rpm - from a Sugar perspective - is that Sugar
> won't want to become tied to Fedora/RH. There's a case for thinking
> through if we can actually use rpm the way we want on Debian and/or
> apt on Fedora. Both rpm and apt are available in old/buggy versions in
> the "other" family of distros.
>
> Using rpm or apt Sugar would getting a bit further away from Windows
> (does cygwin carry either?) - a bit less so on OSX (where the fink
> toolchain will probably work alright, specially with translation pkgs,
> which are by definition "noarch").

Hmm, thinking about this a bit further, how about generating a tar.bz2
with the PO files, with a setup.py file, which can generate a .xot
bundle (with MO files), as well as install in a specified location
(same in function as the setup.py which comes with activities)? In
that way, if someone decides to create a RPM for Fedora (assuming that
Fedora goes the language pack way sometime in the future), or a Deb
for Ubuntu (Ubuntu already uses a language pack system), they can do
it easily (they would have write a spec file though). Does that work ?
Thanks,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]