On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 03:22 -0800, Don Hopkins wrote: > Thanks a lot for writing the activity tutorial, and for answering > questions about them! > > I have some questions about activities, and would appreciate anything > tips you can give me, please: > > What's a good example of an activity that starts and manages another X11 > process, like Squeak?
Not really, because people who write those activities usually don't take the time to put in real D-Bus support, which makes it all a hack. You then need the shim layer, which might talk to the real activity over a unix domain socket, but that's just silly. It's quite a bit easier to just add the D-Bus support. > What are the issues surrounding activities that are implemented as > external processes, as opposed to activities implemented in Python? You need D-Bus support. There's nothing preventing you from writing an activity in any of the languages/libraries that D-Bus has bindings for (C, C++, C#, Python, Qt, GLib, and more). It just happens that in Python, it's _so_ easy to write D-Bus enabled apps. > Is it possible to program activities in Python that run in the Sugar > "desktop manager" process (or whatever it's called), or do they run as > separate Python processes? No, not at this time. > I suppose that would make it possible to quickly start light weight > activities, but it would not firewall them from each other and restrict > their privileges... How's that intended to work? It's not intended to work at this time. > Can you make light weight (to use an ancient term) "desk accessory" > sub-activities that are built into the Sugar manager, that you can pop > up and use quickly while in other activities? (Kinda like the chat > window?) Are those considered activities, or are they called something > else? There aren't currently plans for this, but it's something we've talked about on and off for a while. We haven't yet decided whether to support these or not. > I'm interested to know what ways there are to hook into the Sugar user > interface, and plug in various kinds of user interface thingamabobs. There aren't any ways right now. That's not to say there won't be a way in the future, but I'd caution you that this breaks trust and security models in a few ways. In any case, what type of applets were you thinking about? There may be alternate ways of achieving the functionality that you'd like to have. Cheers, Dan _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/sugar
