Platform Team/Guide/Sweets Usage

This guide describes how to use Sugar Labs' Packaging Management System. See also introduction page.

Installation

Required packages

At first, install PackageKit related packages. The following command will install two Polkit authentication agents, one for Gnome session (if you start sugar emulator from Gnome Desktop Environment) and LXPolkit that will be used from Sugar session.

Fedora specific instructions:

sudo yum install gnome-packagekit lxpolkit

Debian and Ubuntu specific instructons (there is no official package for LXPolkit?):

sudo apt-get install packagekit-gnome

Relogin from X session to let Gnome or Sugar start Polkit authentication agent.

Bundle install

wget http://download.sugarlabs.org/sweets/sweets/installer.sh
sh installer.sh

Relogin from X session to take into account new PATH environment variable value.

Sources install

This will be useful for people who prefer using sources.

• Clone sweets sources and install it (after the first run, you need to relogin to take into account the new PATH value, then just run sweets command):

git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/sdk/sweets.git
cd sweets
git submodule init
git submodule update
./sweets upgrade

Upgrade

If sweets was installed from a bundle:

sweets upgrade

If sweets is being used from sources, pull new commits from cloned directory:

git pull origin master
git submodule update

Launch sugar

To launch sugar session:

sweets sdk/sugar

or to run from Xephyr:

sweets sdk/sugar:emulator

It is possible to run different glucose versions via sweets (for now, testing 0.92+ and stable 0.88 based on Dextrose-2), e.g.:

sweets sdk/sugar:emulator=0.88

To get the full list of available versions:

sweets show sdk/sugar -v

For launch command, all arguments passed after sweet name are treated as launched sweet's arguments. For example, it is possible to run sugar by bassing -f argument:

sweets sdk/sugar:emulator=0.88 -f

If sweets can't find proper implementation, see the E lines in output of:

sweets show sdk/sugar -vdd

Search

It is possible to search sweets among locally known ones and registered on http://obs.sugarlabs.org (not yet implemented). The search is based on Xapian search engine. Thus, it is possible to use Xapian's query language.

Notice that partial search is enabled. So, the query tele will be treated as tele* to search all words that start from tele.

Sweets supports following search prefixes basing of recipe options:

• interface interface url, e.g., http://sweets.sugarlabs.org/sdk/sugar;
• sweet interface in short Sweets notations, e.g., sdk/sugar;
• implement the list of implemented interfaces;
• associate the list of associated interface;
• name the short name of a sweet;
• summary sweet's summary;
• description long sweet's description;
• category list of category names;
• license list of licenses;
• type sweet's type, might be library, application or activity;
• keep if activity, that a sweet is representing, is favorited;
• tags the list of sweet's tags;
• mime_types the list of MIME types activity, that a sweet is representing, supports.

So, it possible to search only among particular sweet attributes, like name:telepathy to search only among sweet names.

Sweets support additional notation for exact searching in form of prefix:=string. For example the query name:=sugar will find sweets only with exactly sugar name and omit names like sugar-base. If search string contains spaces, wrap it to double quotes, name:="Sugar Commander". Note, wildcards does not work in exact search case and asterisks will be treated literally.

Development workflow with sweets

During the first launch, sources will be auto-built and kept in internal storage. To make sweets useful for development, checkout developing project sources in sweets:

sweets checkout [path-to-sources]

The only thing that is required from sources is having a sweets.recipe spec file for non-activity projects or activity/activity.info (that conforms to the same spec) for activities. All sweets for Glucose components are located in the http://git.sugarlabs.org/sdk project.

After being checked out, these sources might be launched using http://sweets.sugarlabs.org/sweet-value-from-sweets.recipe or just mentioning a sweet value:

sweets sweet

For glucose projects, you can find ready-to-use and always-rebased-to-upstream projects in the SDK http://git.sugarlabs.org project. For now, there are two branches: master for recent trunk, and master-0.88 for 0.88 code based on Dextrose-2 patches.

Checked out projects will be built according to the [Build] section commands in the sweets.recipe files. In general, for autotools-based projects, there is no further need for the sweets command, just run make install to build current sources and make install them them to the directory that was specified by sweets in the configure stage. For glucose projects, there is no need even in calling the make command (python code will be reused from its original place, see binding options in sweets.recipe files), just change the code and restart sugar.

Run sweets from X session

Place sweets invocation into your ~/.xsession file:

PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH
sweets sdk/sugar

and create a /usr/share/xsessions/sweets.desktop desktop file:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Sweets
GenericName=Sweets
Exec=/etc/X11/Xsession
Type=Application

Current limitations

• For now, sweets knowns only about the glucose dependencies to install them from native packages in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, and Gentoo.
• Activities can't reuse sweets benefits.

Feedback

• Submit your bug report.
• Ask your question on IRC channels, #sugar (not logged) or #sugar-newbies (logged).