Dear Zero Install developers, as you may know, Sugar is a learning environment consisting of educational activities packaged and distributed as "bundles", which are some kind of glorified zip files.
This design was chosen because we wanted to enable our learners to participate in the creation of new activities using our stack. Secondarily, our security model benefits from unprivileged installation. Unfortunately, our activity bundle format is very limited: no dependencies, no multi-arch build system, no signature checking, weak versioning model, no concept of source bundles, and general immaturity of the toolset. On the other hand, most (but certainly not all) our activities happen to be simple, "Pure Python" applications with no need for the complexity of a full-blown packaging discipline. Most of us like this simplicity and wish to retain it. Nevertheless, now that Sugar runs on multiple architectures and OSes, these limitations are starting to chafe. Zero Install appears to have identified reasonable compromises for many of these trade-offs. While I'm not yet claiming that z-i would be a better alternative for us to pick off the shelf, there's certainly a lot of experience within your community to learn from. Also, I understand from previous discussions [1] that hosting for package repositories would be helpful to you. I think we could help out by sharing our bandwidth and disk space. Sounds like an interaction in which both sides have something useful to give :) How about getting together on IRC to exchange ideas regarding packaging strategies? I'd propose next Saturday @ 1500UTC [2], of course negotiable. [1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.zero-install.devel/2753 [2] http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=10&day=17&year=2009&hour=11&min=0&sec=0&p1=43 -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel