[Sugar-devel] MANIFEST pointlessness

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Mon, 2010-07-05 at 15:13 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

> Would be good to have some way of tracking what needs to be solved
> before we can do the switch. Two questions off the top of my head are
> how first-time activity authors are going to package their software

Now they do:

  ./setup.py fix_manifest
  ./setup.py dist_xo

When we remove the manifest thing, they could do:

  ./setup.py dist_xo


None of the activities I have seen so far store a manually generated
MANIFEST in git. In case they'd need to exclude some files, hopefully
setup.py would provide extensibility hooks.

Actually, I've never seen a setup.py containing anything else than the
two lines of copy-pasted code (plus the usual dozen lines of legal
crap). Activities which need to build binaries, such as Physics, require
a manual build step.

This confirms my theory that the xo bundle format is so easy to use just
because it doesn't do any of the things that a packaging system needs to
do. Currently, setup.py is just a glorified "zip -r".


> and also what those people will have to do to modify an activity
> installed in their system. (But maybe not discuss these in this
> thread?).

Currently, upgrading an activity causes the new files to be merged with
the old ones. This is clearly a bug that should be fixed.

The MANIFEST doesn't play any role in activity installation. The version
of Sugar shipped in F11-0.88 contains a patch that removes all this code
and it is functionally identical from the user's point of view, apart
from not logging warnings when the MANIFEST contains inconsistencies.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/