On Cerebro, Telepathy, yokes and whites (was Re: cerebro in sugar)

[Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos]

Quoting "C. Scott Ananian" <cscott at laptop.org>:
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 7:51 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
> <mpgritti at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 7:05 PM, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
>> <ypod at mit.edu> wrote:
>> * The abstraction layer needs to be accessible to non-python
>> activities. Unless you want to expose it through DBus, you will have
>> to write it in C (with python bindings). And if I'm not mistake
>> Cerebro is written in python.
>
> So expose it through DBus.  This is done already, if I understand correctly.

Cerebro offers a dbus interface, so it can be used by non-python activities.
I published this some time ago: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Cerebro

>
>> * I haven't seen any concrete technical argument against telepathy 
>> *API* so far.
>
> I've got a concrete non-technical objection: kids at gamejams
> invariably want to write a multiplayer game.  Almost none succeed.
> This tells me we need a better collaboration API.
>
> You can argue that this "simple" API should be *on top* of the
> lower-level telepathy (or cerebro) API, and I won't argue.  But we
> need *something* which a 12-year old can use.


This was exactly my point.


>
>> If you think telepathy API is irremediably broken, I suggest you focus
>> on coming up with an alternative which meets all the requirements
>> (included working for non python activities) and at the same time it's
>> technically superior to the telepathy one (enough to be worth an API
>> break of these dimensions).
>
> My personal metric revolves around tutorials: can you write a simple
> and straightforward guide to using your API?  I haven't seen such a
> thing yet for telepathy or cerebro; the first one to come up with such
> a thing would score points in my personal metric (not the only one
> which counts, of course).
>  http://www.pygame.org/wiki/tutorials
>  http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2tutorial/   <-- for big kids

On the same page as above I also included an example of how to direcly use
cerebro's dbus interface. I never got any comments on it, although I'm willing
to change it in any way necessary.

p.