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 -