cerebro in sugar (was Re: New, more realistic multi-hop network testbed)

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 4:16 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 11:06:17AM +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
>> > I still don't understand what's in the path to integrate cerebro into
>> > sugar. You proposed to change the API and of course you were asked to
>> > justify this.
>> >
>> > Seems to me like now everybody agrees on coding a cerebro connection
>> > manager, which would bring cerebro's benefits without having to change
>> > the API.
>> >
>> > What's the problem?
>>
>> Yeah. There is interest to integrate cerebro. It's just very unclear
>> (to me at least) what's the path to get there...
>
> If you want to see what needs to be done to "integrate cerebro", then
> please examine
>
>  http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/mstone/telepathy-cerebro;a=blob;f=tpc/service.py;hb=HEAD
>
> When someone fills in those stubs correctly, we will have a Cerebro
> connection manager. That ought to be enough to drive the mesh view. Then
> someone will need to implement D-Bus and Stream tubes (not stubbed out
> here). That will permit activity sharing.
>
> The basic hang-up here is that our currently shareable activities are
> built on Telepathy but there are few OLPC-related people who understand
> and enjoy the Telepathy stack. Poly, according to his perogative, has
> decided that building a Cerebro connection manager is not a good use of
> his time. The Collabora staff most familiar with Telepathy are, at my
> request, concentrating on Gadget for us for August.

Thanks for the explanation, Michael.

I guess the only part I don't understand is why Poly would consider
writing a connection manager not a good use of his time. Telepathy is
the API used by both activities and the sugar shell. And unless
someone demonstrate that it's inherently broken and provides a better
alternative, I don't see it going away. Also as far as I understood
Cerebro doesn't provide an API that can be used directly by activities
yet (included the non-python ones).

Marco