[Etoys] Etoys packaging (was: SugarPlatform-0.84.0 on Mandriva)

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 16.03.2009, at 12:45, Aleksey Lim wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 12:11:05PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> One minor issue I see with this packaging is that etoys is  
>> technically
>> part of glucose, but you packaged it as part of fructose (as "etoys-
>> activity"). If someone was to only install glucose then another  
>> etoys-
>> based activity would not work. (if the whole platform is installed  
>> it's
>> fine of course)
>>
>> I think the packaging Gavin did for Fedora is less confusing. He also
>> has one package that provides both etoys and etoys-activity, but the
>> package's name is "etoys". Not sure if the Fedora glucose package
>> depends on this yet, but it could.
> yup, its my old fault
> but now, changing current behavior means reforming glucose/fructose
> packages in 4(5) repos.
>
> As you mentioned it means nothing for non-tech users(they just install
> meta-package) but has additional pro for tech users - if someone  
> develops
> activity(which isn't etoys based) he could save time and not  
> downloading ~25M ;)
>
> -- 
> Aleksey

Well, the major reason not to package it only as "sugar-etoys- 
activity" (which is obvious to me but I tend to forget not everyone  
knows this):

Etoys does not actually depend on Sugar. It works fine as stand-alone  
application. The "sugar-toolkit" dependency should be removed--Etoys  
does not use the toolkit but talks to Sugar directly via D-Bus. It  
also only mimics the Sugar user interface (and we actually chose to  
use the same interface on other platforms too, for easier  
documentation).

Instead, you might want to add a menu entry for normal desktop use  
(attaching the non-Sugar icon we typically use). And with a bit of  
fiddling we also might get the Firefox plugin to work, so kids can  
directly view the material at http://squeakland.org/ ...

So an easy solution may be to add another package simply called  
"etoys", move everything except the stuff under /usr/share/sugar into  
that new package, and make "sugar-etoys-activity" depend on "etoys".

OTOH the Etoys-activity is so small (it really only is a shell script  
with icons) that it might make sense to just include it in the "etoys"  
package as in Fedora now.

I should mention that the activity and the base package are only  
loosely coupled. For most releases of "Etoys-activity" only the NEWS  
file changes, because it also lists the changes in the "etoys" base.  
Which might be a bad idea in hindsight.

Another point to consider is that some activities (e.g., MIT's Scratch  
and OLE Nepal's E-Paath) do not actually depend on Etoys but just on  
the squeak-vm package that etoys depends on. I think that distinction  
has not been addressed yet (but then I am not even sure if it is  
indeed a problem).

Fortunately nothing of this is really urgent - IIRC then Gavin only  
chose to stuff the activity into the main etoys package to avoid the  
delay inevitably incurred when asking for a new package to get in.

I'm open to discussing all of this, and arranging upstream changes if  
this was helpful. Having non-Etoys developers repackaging our stuff is  
new territory for us, and I'm actually quite surprised how well you  
guys cope ;)

Thanks!

- Bert -

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