[sugar] Wrapping Sugar activities for other desktops

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 7:32 AM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thinking about how to extend the appeal (and long term viability!) of
> sugar activities, one thing that appears as a clear opportunity is to
> create a wrapper that allows to run sugar activities in a conventional
> gnome/kde/xfce/awesome desktop.

Sounds good, it's on the list of the things I'd really like to do but
I'm too swamped to put focus on :(

> It could open a regular window (instead of the root window), and
> mimick the minimal set of Sugar facilities that activities depend on.

An activity is a regular window already. It's just the wm which
displays it fullscreen. So we should be fine there.

> Perhaps a thinner, lighter set of classes providing the sugar api (add
> the path to these "shim" libraries early in the python path to mask
> the "full blown" sugar libs).
>
> Right now, if I install on ubuntu sugar-activities, I get turteart,
> but I can only use it inside sugar-emulator. If we had such a shim so
> that
>
>  $ sugar-wrapper turtleart
>
> would start turtleart in a regular window, then that command can be
> given an icon in my gnome menu, kde's kickstart menu, etc.

Yeah, you would need a little script to bridge to our non-standard
activity launching stuff. Another approach might be to make it more
standard or to brige it directly with desktop files.

> Of course there are some hard things
>
>  - clipboard support probably needs glue

You should be fine here, we use standard X stuff.

>  - journal behaviour - though it might be relatively simple

Not sure about this one... Do we want to make a journal activity
available or to provide compatibility with posix?

>  - naming documents that the user hasn't named explicitly

Depends on what we want to do for the previous point.

>  - the initial steps of sharing a collaborative activity
> (announcement, invites, etc)

Maybe make the mesh view available as a standalone application?

Marco