Just a quick summary of a discussion and a decision that we reached on IRC, which will hold at least for now with our XO-1.5 software builds. Further input is welcome, although this is at risk of starting another huge discussion...
Question: In the early XO-1.5 OS builds right now, we have a mix of RPM-based sugar activity packages, and .xo files unzipped in /home/olpc/Activities. Do we want to change? - It would be a little unfortunate to ignore the hard work of those who have been actively packaging the activities within Fedora. - rpm-based packages cannot be updated with Sugar's updater utility, which is the primary way for updating activities right now. There is no upgrade path for activities installed by rpms (without updating the whole OS, which is another open question) - We could somehow hack the updater to work with rpms, i.e. if it found a newer .xo bundle it could unzip it over the top of the rpm-installed files in /usr/share/sugar/activities, but this is nasty and would raise many issues - One flaw in the existing OLPC OS releases for XO-1 is that there's no way for deployments to push automatic activity updates, because olpc-update doesn't touch /home and the activity updater always has to be invoked by the user. - This flaw would go away with rpm-based updates, because whatever "global" OS updater we choose would include these updates. - Which leads onto the possibility that *all* activities could be shipped as RPMs, the sugar control panel activity updater could be deleted, and then this problem is solved -- but that's quite a change - The easy option is to do what we've done before: ship activities entirely as .xo bundles in /home/olpc/Activities - We're going to go with this option for now, because it's quick and easy and it's what we're already doing. - There is certainly room for improvement in future, but finding development time in the short term may be a bit tricky... or perhaps we will be able to raise community interest in making or implementing a plan for improvement... :) Daniel _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel