Platform Team/Guide/Sweets Usage

This guide describes how to use Sugar Labs' Packaging Management System.

Requirements

• Install PackageKit and PackageKit authentication agent from native packages. On Debian-based systems, these packages are packagekit and packagekit-gnome (for Gnome Desktop Environment). For Fedora, PackageKit and gnome-packagekit.

• PackageKit authentication agent should be launched to let the sweets command install dependencies. Usually it is started after being logged into a Desktop Environment session (it isn't for Sugar session).

Installation

• 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 --recursive git://git.sugarlabs.org/sdk/sweets.git
sweets/sweets upgrade

• If sweets sources were already cloned, pull new changes from cloned directory:

git --recurse-submodules pull origin master

• TODO more easy installation for non-tech people

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

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

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).