[Debian-olpc-devel] All packages up-to-date!

[Morgan Collett]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 22:54, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
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> Hi all,
>
> All Debian-packaged Sugar software should now (or in a few hours when
> archive gets updated) be up-to-date with upstream.

That's great!

> In addition to being available in standard Debian unstable, you can also
> get them for Lenny by adding the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list
> (amd64 and i386 currently - might add powerpc later):
>
>  deb http://debian.jones.dk/ lenny sugar
>
>
> Here are some tasks that would be nice if someone would do:
>
>  * Try convince release team that these updates should be included in
>    Lenny if at all possible.  They are mostly bugfixes and locale
>    improvements, and they interfere with no other packages so even in
>    the unlikely event that they turn out to be more broken than
>    earlier releases they should not cause collateral damage.
>  * Fix lintian errors and warnings.  Binaries that need man pages etc.
>  * Package activities.  Use sugar-journal-activity as skeleton, and
>    start with pure Python packages, unless you want challenges:
>    Upstream has weird ways of handling build-dependencies (like
>    pulling in a full Git clone as par tof the build process, or
>    including precompiled binaries with source).

Some of this strange upstream behaviour is due to OLPC's security
setup on the XO, including the following points:
* Activities are packaged ("bundled") in zip files with a .xo
extension, and installed in ~/Activities, so that they can be
installed without privileges.
* There is no specification of dependencies for .xo activities -
anything not included in the system build must be provided in the .xo.
This is to keep the packaging format as simple as possible and allow
for people creating activity bundles on other platforms just by using
zip and the appropriate files.
* Activities are prevented from accessing files or processes of other
activities.

The Calculate activity uses some code ("sharedstate") which was spun
off into its own git repo so that other people can reuse it, but then
it has this weird build script which does a git checkout of
sharedstate to include the code in the activity. I'm not aware of any
other activities which use sharedstate, and the build script was
optimised for sugar's jhbuild development environment. I'll work with
upstream to try and improve this because the standard Sugar
bundlebuilder can't produce a clean source tarball for it.

Hopefully now that Sugar is independent of OLPC, some of this type of
thing can be improved...

Regards
Morgan