[sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

[Erik Garrison]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 08:21:34PM +0200, Bastien wrote:
> Erik Garrison <erik at laptop.org> writes:
> 
> > On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 12:40:39AM +0200, Bastien wrote:
> >> It's not that important anyway.  It just occurred to me that the
> >> dependancies management challenge could be somehow dealt with by
> >> delivering a set of default activities.  I'm not aware of any 
> >> software distribution drawing such a strong line between the 
> >> "core system" and the applications/activities.
> >> 
> >
> > We have been managing the dependency issue by ensuring that the 'core'
> > activities required for a given build all work on the system-level
> > software packages we include.  
> 
> What is the set of "core activities"?  how does this depend on a "given
> build"?  
> 

e.g., (for an old build): http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Core

I mean 'core' in the sense that the core activities are those included
on a specific os image by default.  Users can install activities later.
These are not 'core'.

> Maybe what I'm suggesting boils down to integrate this core activities
> in the environment so that people installing Sugar won't have to install
> them separatly.  Just the same way that installing a standard Fedora
> will install Gnome (will install evolution (etc...)).
> 

What I'm suggesting is that this step requires global optimization wrt
which activities are 'core'.  This is difficult, as various deployments
have different usage patterns and require different sets of software.

I have often built debian systems using debootstrap to pull in the most
minimal typically used system components.  On top of such a system
customization is easy.  I am suggesting that we may wish to develop a
similar system so that our downstream developers can have more
flexibility in customizing their systems.  Activites could be Sugar-core
and not XO-system core.

Erik