specifying what services Activities may use

[Erik Garrison]

Greg,

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 11:03:41AM -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> What I think we need is a list of all APIs relevant to activity 
> developers (maybe libraries too?).  You can parse it however you want.
 
The potential size of that list is in the order of all software
libraries useful to software developers.  We need to have the developers
tell us what they need.

> We need a list of anything that might "break" an activity. Give us 
> whatever you have, even if its not the full story. Hopefully we can put 
> together the full puzzle one piece at a time.

Ideally we would have a list of dependencies for each activity.

See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Development_issues

  *  Choice of libraries and required applications: you may not have
  the dependencies you might need, or those dependencies might come at
  too high a memory cost. We will inventory what you can "count on" in the
  basic system as it becomes clear. 

  In the meantime, make sure you know your application's dependencies.
  For compiled code, run it with "ldd" to get a list of all the libraries
  being loaded. For Python code, run it with "python -v" to get a list of
  all modules imported. 

As a first pass at this problem we can encourage activity authors to
publicize dependencies for their application.  We can help them do so by
providing a set of steps (such as the one quoted above) which they can
follow to build a dependency list and provide easy access to a
repository of such dependency data.  (Are we doing so already?  My
impression is that we are not.)

This list will at least help us understand what dependencies are common
among many activities and pick libraries to pull into our builds.  Such
dependency lists are a good prerequisite for any package management
scheme for the XO, automated or not.


Erik