Platform Team/Package Management System

Summary

Sweets is a Package Management System based on Zero Install, a decentralized cross-distribution software installation system. It is intended to distribute various software projects created in the Sugar ecosystem, such as libraries, sugar itself, and sugar activities.

This new distribution method is initiated assuming that:

• The method to share software projects should to be as convenient as possible.
• It is important to stimulate users into becoming doers, to modify existing activities, and to share the results of their experiments with other people, i.e., a distribution method should handle different variants of the same project.
• This distribution method is not intended to be the only one.

The purpose is to create a new distribution method instead of reusing:

• .xo bundles
  • Work smoothly only for pure python activities, and only if all (and the same) dependencies are installed on all systems. They stop working smoothly if activities use non-standard dependencies or contain binaries.
  • Users need to manually handle the variety of activity versions, e.g., sort out all local bundles or directories in ~/Activities.
• native packages
  • Not the shortest way between developers and users.
  • In most cases, they don't support multiple versions of the same project.
  • They don't work at all for sharing results of experiments.

At the same time, existing distribution methods are reused in Sweets:

• .xo bundles is a subset of the Sweets workflow
  • It is possible to bundle an entire directory as a sweet project to use it as a regular .xo file.
• native packages
  • Sweets is not intended to create one more GNU/Linux distribution. It distributes only projects that people create within the Sugar community; all other software will be reused from native packages.

Start from

Start from these pages:

• Sweets Usage guide.