Adding new activities to comps.xml

[Wade Brainerd]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Scott Douglass <scott at swdouglass.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 23:46 +0000, Martin Dengler wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 05:43:39PM -0500, Steven M. Parrish wrote:
>> > We have added quite a few new activiies to Fedora in the past few weeks.  As
>> > it stands now they are not installed by default when someone does a
>> >
>> > yum groupinstall "SUGAR Desktop Environment"
>> >
>> > So the question is do we want them to be installed by default or left to the
>> > user to manually install.
>>
>> Of the four obvious answers:
>>
>> 1) Add them all
>> 2) Add any/all "Fructose"[1] packages and a "minimal"[2] set
>> 3) Add "minimal"[2] set: sugar-update-control, sugar-help, sugar-read
>> (of what you mentioned was available)
>> 4) Add none
>>
>> ...If I had a vote I'd say +1 to "Fructose" packages + minimal set (my
>> option #2 above).  I'm +0 on adding them all.  And I would be -1 on
>> not including any, since that's not really appropriate to the audience
>> (if you're not picking packages individually you want someone to give
>> you something useful right away, which sugar without any activities is
>> not).

We have the Fructose activities which are core elements of Sugar and
should always be included - Log, Write, Turtle Art, etc.  Their
sources are located here:

http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/

Then there are the Honey activities which are extra but are also
considered stable and high quality.  Their sources are here:

http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/honey/

There are still quite a few from the OLPC G1G1 list that are not in
these groups yet.  We need to contact their maintainers to encourage
them to get on the non-OLPC Sugar bandwagon, and in some cases the
SugarLabs Activity Team needs to adopt them and package them
ourselves...there have been quite a few examples of this already.

My recommendation would be to include the Fructose + Honey activities
with a "Sugar Desktop Environment" install (why was Sugar capitalized
in your example? it's not an acronym).  We will do our best to get all
the appropriate G1G1 activities into Honey.

Having the distributions stick with the Fructose vs Honey level of
granularity is probably better than having distributions choosing from
individual activities.  Better for the ActivityTeam to decide what's
stable and have all the distributions get the same stuff.

> How about we include all of them that actually work? It doesn't appear
> that xomail works for one...

Yeah, xomail (now sweetmail) is still more of a prototype than a
working activity.  It should not be in this list.

> I think when the day comes when it's possible for a person to "upgrade"
> from OLPC build 767+G1G1 or whatever to F11/12/13... they get at least
> the applications they used to have.

And many more once they discover activities.sugarlabs.org.

Note that one issue still unresolved is the presence of binary blobs
within activity bundles.  We've had some discussions about how to
handle this but at the moment, several activities will only be able to
run on x86 Linux.

Regards,
Wade