Platform Team/Guide/Sweets Packaging

Introduction

The purpose of this HOWTO is describe how to get benefits of Sugar Services for your library/application, simplify support fork flows and let your users(developers) use your code in simple and convenient way.

Services are just a set of definitions for urls and names for 0install feeds, it provides to activity developers convenient way to use services. But regular 0install work flow still works. The rest of document describes sugar specific work flow to meet 0sugar benefits.

service.info file

Service publishing work flow is similar to activities. There is an info file, here service/service.info, which describes current status(not history) of development process. All these fields, finally, go to feed file while publishing new version.

All fields should be placed to [Service] section

• name, the identity of service, this field defines name of feed's root directory on the server http://download.sugarlabs.org/services/ as well
• summary, short descriptive line
• description, long descriptive line, to wrap long text, all lines after second, should start with spaces
• homepage
• version, current version
• stability, level of stability for version, see [1]
• license, in 0install, typically a Trove category, as used on freshmeat.net, but could be fedora names, since the rest of sugar uses them
• binding, what environment variables, 0sugar should export to session which uses this service

binding = [prepend|append|replace] <variable-name> [<insert-text-to-prepand-variable-value>] [; ...]

• main, for applications, path to binary from service root directory
• gpg-key, identify gpg key to sign feeds, useful if there are several keys to sign

0sugar-publish tool

To start using services, install 0sugar-publish which is main tool to maintain services infrastructure.

0alias 0sugar-publish http://download.sugarlabs.org/services/0sugar-publish/feed.xml