Documentation Team/Obsolete/Services Wrap native packages HOWTO

Introduction
The purpose of this Guide is to describe how to simplify the usage by activity or service developers of packages that are not included in the Sugar Platform but are well packaged by various GNU/Linux distributions.

Workflows

 * If the service you are planing to use already exists on http://download.sugarlabs.org/services/, just add its name to the requires field in your activity or service .info file.
 * Otherwise, read the rest of this document to learn how to create a service that represents a native package.

Detailed description
To use native packages, they should be wrapped into services. Such services are lightweight and contain only the appropriate information about native packages. By having service wrappers, we can collect all distro-specific information in one place, because various GNU/Linux distributions could have different names for the same upstream application.

Prime distributions list
According to http://distrowatch.com/, there are several distributions whose names could be mentioned in a service. The following table is a list of primary distributions from the top 100 for year 2009 (excluding source-based and special distributions), in most cases, their names will be the same in all derivative distributions.

Package wrappers are regular services, so read the Service Developers Guide first.

service.info file
In addition to the standard service.info file, the wrappers' file contains the following:


 * Service section contains only
 * name
 * summary
 * description
 * homepage
 * It should contain one or more Distro:  sections
 * Distro: section with name *, describes common distro parameters.

Each Distro: section


 * should contain a name field which is a local package name for the service,
 * an optional buildtime-name field, which goes to the buildtime.xml feed, by default name will be used.
 * Applications could contain a main field with a full path to the exec file (which could be different for different distributions).

Workflow

 * Create a service.info file.
 * Add a Distro:* section with common distro parameters.
 * Add Distro:  sections, at least for sugar supported distributions.
 * Execute 0sugar push to upload changes to the server.
 * If a service's application is not well packaged, please consider the possibility of adding source and binary service implementations.

Known issues

 * In RO mode (check if some package is installed), 0install can work only with deb and rpm based distributions or, if PackageKit is installed, all distributions that current PackageKit version supports.
 * To install packages, the system should have PackageKit.