Platform Team/Guide/Sweets Packaging

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Introduction

The purpose of this Guide is describing 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.

Detailed description

The result for service development process will be regular 0install files that are placed to subdirectory on http://download.sugarlabs.org/services/ with name which is identity for the service in the rest of 0sugar infrastructure:

  • feed.xml, regular 0install feed file
  • bunch of tarballs with sources and binaries, feed.xml contains links to these files

Feed file feed.xml, in addition to several information fields, contains <implementation> tag which describes implementation of the service, in distribution terms, package. At the same time, feed file could contain various implementations for various service versions. More over the same version could be represented by several implementations:

  • source implementation, with links to source tarball and instructions how to build it
  • no arch implementation, which can be used as-is on different platforms e.g. pure python services
  • one or several binary implementations, that contain binaries for the same source implementation but for various dependency environments(e.g. f9 could contain different versions for the same service dependency in comparing with f11)

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.

Service.info file should contain at least [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 exec file from service root directory
  • gpg-key, identify gpg key to sign feeds, useful if there are several keys to sign
  • build-command, for services that have compilation stage, command how to build binaries
    Its value is a shell command, executed inside the build directory $BUILDDIR. It must compile the source in $SRCDIR, putting the final result (ready for distribution) in $DISTDIR. If this command starts to get complicated, you should move it to a script (either inside the main source archive or in a separate dependency) and just set this attribute to the command to run the script.
    NOTE: This command will be executed not only in service developer environment but also on user side if proper binary wasn't found, so do not use here any development related dependencies like autogen.sh
    For example, followed command builds regular autotools based project
"$SRCDIR"/configure --prefix="$DISTDIR" && make install
  • requires, for any arch and binary implementations of the service
requires = <service-name> [<not-before-version>[-<before-version>]] [; ...]
  • build-requires, what services should be installed before building service from sources
build-requires = <service-name> [<not-before-version>[-<before-version>]] [; ...]

Service.info file could contain other sections for various binary implementations. These sections are intended to describe particular dependencies environment and should contain only requires fields e.g if service developer is going to support binary implementations for f9 and f11, [F9] and [F11] sections will contain requires fields with dependencies versions that are used in f9 and f11. Names of these fields will be used in dist_bin command of 0sugar-publish application.

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

While working, 0sugar-publish creates dist/ directory in project's root and uses it as a rsynced copy of service's directory on the server. So, you need ssh access to sunjammer server, create ticket for shell.sugarlabs.org category on http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/.

0sugar-publish commands are:

  • init, get feed file from the server and place it to dist/
  • fetch, rsync entirely dist/ from the server
  • dist, create source or any arch tarball/implementation in dist/ directory and tweak dist/feed.xml correspondingly
    If there is second option-less argument, it will be treated as a path of tarball to release(e.g. you can create such tarball by make distcheck command for autotools based projects), otherwise 0sugar-publish will tar all project files(and try to avoid temporary files as much as possible)
    dist will create
    • any arch archive, if build-command field was omitted in service.info
    • source archive, if service.info has build-command field
  • dist_bin, create binary tarball/implementation for current arch in dist/ directory and tweak dist/feed.xml correspondingly
    if second argument was passed, it will be treated as a name of service.info section with additional requires fields
  • push, rsync dist/ to the server
  • lint, check feed file on the server
    will run FeedLint application for http://download.sugarlabs.org/services/ feed

Any arch services

Work flow for services that don't require compilation stage thus could be just packaged and used as is on server side:

  • increase/change version/stability field in service.info file
  • 0sugar-publish dist to change local feed in dist/ and place there tarball
  • 0sugar-publish push to rsync changed files from dist/ to the server

Binary services

Work flow for services that require compilation stage:

  • provide relevant value for build-command field in service.info file
  • increase/change version/stability field in service.info file
  • 0sugar-publish dist to add sources tarball to dist/ and change local feed correspondingly
  • on every platform, you are trying to support binaries for, run 0sugar-publish dist_bin to build, and add to local field, binaries for this particular platform
  • 0sugar-publish push to rsync changed files from dist/ to the server

Versioning scheme

Service are welcome to use API changes based versioning scheme(except obvious cases then service uses upstream versions): 

<major-version>.<minor-version>
  • the major version starts from 0(premature state) and exposes the fact of API backwards compatibility breakage
  • the minor version is for bugfixes and features that don't break backwards compatibility

Commands like dist and dist-bin don't remove previous versions from feed(you still can manually remove them from dist/feed.xml) so, new release doesn't break code which depends on your service.

NOTE: Be careful, some services and activities could be stuck to particular versions(major versions) of your service, so do not delete stable releases if they still work in declared sugar environments.

Documentation

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