View Source question

[Robert Myers]

Ok, I started this thread. So here's why I was asking.

I'm on board with Todd's comments. I got a XO though G1G1 and one of the 
listed features was 'view source'. Meaning specifically to open the 
Python underlying an activity.

I discovered that 1) very few activities currently support this. 2) 
there doesn't seem to be published example code of how to do it.

As a learning experience, I'm playing with adapting an existing pyGame 
program to be a well-mannered XO activity. So, I want to implement 'View 
Source' 1) to teach myself, and 2) to share as an example.

So, I'm really not (at this time) interested in peeling layers, or that 
it's a no-brainer in squeak, or frankly (again at this time) deeper 
implications or philosophy.

The philosophy is interesting and challenging, but I just want to figure 
out how to implement a feature that the XO was supposed to have. Mainly 
so that it can be there to show 'hey, we said we'd do this, and we did it'.

So for right now I'm going back to reverse engineering from Chat, and 
trying to understand the differences between a normal activity wrapper 
(like Chat's) and the pyGame activity wrapper (like what's currently 
wrapping my activity).

Oh, is there any documentation on 'activity.info'? Different instances 
have different fields and it isn't immediately clear to me what they all 
are supposed to do.

Frankly, this is where I'm most frustrated with OLPC and the XO. I don't 
mind having paid $430 for the privilege of being an unpaid beta tester. 
But it has been difficult to figure out what does work, what should work 
but doesn't and what's not yet expected to work. The schedule slippage 
on things like the release of update 1 and and the failure to fix bugs 
that seem mechanical in nature (example: #6465 "Browse activity fails to 
load Java plugin", where the issue seems to be that all the pieces 
weren't compiled with the same libraries) is frustrating too.

I apologize (a little) for rambling off topic.

Bob