[Sugar-devel] One instance activity

[Pablo Posada]

Thank you all for your answers.
What i am actually facing is a problem with a sugarizing. I need to run 
the script, copy-to-Journal.py from a C program.
1 - With "exec dbus-launch CActivity $args" in the sugarActivity file, i 
can run multiple instances but i cant run the script. It crashes throwing 
a python error. In olpc wiki says that the scripts only works running with 
olpc user. I dont know if the dbus-launch changes something in the way the 
scripts are called.

Error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Python.AttributeError: Traceback (most recent 
call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/dbus/service.py", line 692, in 
_message_cb
    retval = candidate_method(self, *args, **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/olpc/datastore/datastore.py", 
line 215, in create
    mp.create_async(props, filelike, can_move=transfer_ownership,
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'create_async'
2 - But changing it to "exec CActivity $args" the scripts run perfect, but 
the second instance of the activity throws an "error when trying to load 
or save configuration... "
   Configuration server couldn't be contacted: D-BUS error: Method 
"LookupExtended" 
        with signature "ssb" on interface "org.gnome.GConf.Database" 
doesn't exist 
***********
SugarActivity file: sugarPlanilla
***********
#!/bin/sh
args=""
while [ -n "$2" ] ; do
     case "$1" in
         -b | --bundle-id)     export SUGAR_BUNDLE_ID="$2" ;;
         -a | --activity-id)   export SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ID="$2" ;;
         -o | --object-id)     export SUGAR_OBJECT_ID="$2" ; echo "o $2"; 
args="$args -o $2" ;;
         -u | --uri)           export SUGAR_URI="$2" ;;
         *) echo unknown argument $1 $2 ;;
     esac
     shift;shift
done
echo $args
export LD_PRELOAD="$SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH/lib/libsugarize.so"
export NET_WM_NAME="Planilla"
exec gnumeric $args

and the Activity.info runs the sugarActivity file.
exec = sugarPlanilla
Thanks,
Pablo Posada
____________________________________________ 


Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> 
12/10/2008 11:17 AM CET

To 

david at lang.hm

cc 

Pablo Posada <pablo.posada at tcs.com>, OLPC Development 
<devel at lists.laptop.org>, Sugar Devel <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>

bcc 


Subject 

Re: [Sugar-devel] One instance activity




On 10.12.2008, at 11:56, david at lang.hm wrote:

> On Wed, 10 Dec 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>
>> On 10.12.2008, at 03:57, david at lang.hm wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, 9 Dec 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>>> On 09.12.2008, at 18:55, Eben Eliason wrote:
>>>>> Are you sure?  Browse makes use of shared code, but still
>>>>> presents the
>>>>> user with the appearance of multiple instances.
>>>> Right.
>>>> The way to do it would be to create a unique D-Bus service in your
>>>> activity. When the second instance tries to create that service it
>>>> will notice that it already exists. It could then notify its first
>>>> instance via said D-Bus service.
>>> you don't need to use D-Bus for this, it can be done by X without
>>> any other communication channels.
>>> I don't know the details for how to do this, but I've seen mozilla/
>>> firefox do this for a few years. to see this start firefox on one
>>> machine, connect to another machine and point the display back to
>>> the first one. then try and start firefox on that second machine.
>>> the end result will be a new window opening up, but running on the
>>> first machine (if you have trouble seeing the difference, make the
>>> two machines have different bookmarks, or give one network access
>>> that the other doesn't have)
>>> please don't develop new mechanisms to do things that already exist.
>>
>>
>> It's not a new mechanism. The usage of a named D-Bus service to
>> ensure unique program instances is documented and not my invention
>> (though I cannot remember where I saw it first).
>>
>> I should have written "One way to do this would be ...", I give you
>> that.
>>
>> But you cannot know which way would be preferable for a given
>> activity. And since it is private to the activity and does not
>> affect other activities, no harm is done either way.
>>
>> E.g., twiddling X properties is hard in various high-level
>> languages, in particular when using higher-level UI toolkits. Sugar
>> currently requires two custom X properties and this is causing
>> activity authors considerable pain. Even Sugar itself had to resort
>> to C code, adding a custom native library to manipulate these
>> properties, it was not easy in pure Python. This is in stark
>> contrast to the nicely general and easy-to-use Python D-Bus
>> bindings, which are similarly available in other high-level
>> languages.
>>
>> So please consider that not all people like having to go down into
>> the machine room to make new plumbing with a C compiler. Having
>> done too much of that myself I can relate to them.
>
> my initial reaction to this is that this sounds like a gap in the
> python libraries that would be very useful to fill. getting someone
> to write a python library to better access the X properties would
> help many areas.
>
> any idea why nobody has written one yet? Python is much better than
> many languages at letting you write a library in C and then use it
> cleanly, so if doing this in python is as hard as you are
> indicating, why hasn't it been addressed?


I don't know. And this is diverging from the subject at hand.

Even if it was simple to set and read an X property then implementing
single-instance apps via X properties still would be considerable more
complex than using D-Bus. You would have to learn a whole lot about
how X works first, and then design that mechanism on top of it. Having
done a fair bit of X programming myself (the Squeak VM talks to Xlib
directly, no toolkit) I would not exactly rate this as trivial. X can
be abused to do IPC, sure, but it still is abuse. D-Bus is made to do
that.

- Bert -


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