Platform Team/Infrastructure

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This page describes the infrastructure map that the Platform Team provides. See also Sweets introduction page.

Introduction

Technologies involved within the Platform Team infrastructure

Zero Install - Decentralized cross-distribution software installation system that Sweets is based on.
PackageKit - Is used as a backend for Zero Install to work with native package management systems.
Open Build Service (OBS) - The hosting and build service.
addons.mozilla.org (AMO) - The source software for Activity Library.

The entire workflow is whirling around the following major services: <imagemap> File:Platform.png rect 8 144 192 184 [1] rect 280 160 423 200 [2] rect 504 200 679 240 [3] rect 72 223 239 264 [4] rect 8 296 184 336 [5] desc none </imagemap>

Services

obs.sugarlabs.org

The cornerstone component that's intended to be a place to consolidate all the efforts of Sugar doers regarding the sharing of code:

hosting released sources (so, there is no need in requesting a shell account to upload files to http://download.sugarlabs.org),
being a universal build farm for binary-based projects.

It is an instance of Open Build Service.

In many cases, obs.sugarlabs.org will be used implicitly:

while uploading a new version from the sweets commit command,
while managing already released versions (and uploading new ones using the Web UI) from Activity Library's Developers Hub,
launching will happen just by calling a sweet URL.

The only thing required is being registered in the Sugar Labs Central Login system.

activities.sugarlabs.org

This is the Activity Library. Once obs.sugarlabs.org is in service, the Activity Library will be (for now, it is entirely .xo based) just a catalog of activities, all downloading will happen from download.sugarlabs.org.

In the doers' environment, the Activity Library will be a catalog of sweets. In other words, activities.sugarlabs.org might be treated as a front-end for the Sugar development process (where obs.sugarlabs.org is a back-end) and an analog of the current Developer Hub on Activity Library.

From a usage point of view, only the Zero Install interface URL is needed to obtain a new Activity Library entity; the rest will be done by Sweets under the hood.

packages.sugarlabs.org

It is an original Web interface to Open Build Service. It seems to be an overkill for regular Sugar doers' workflow (since OBS is primarily designed to support a native packages workflow) when Activity Library's Developers Hub can be used as a more appropriate OBS client. But packages.sugarlabs.org will be useful when people need full OBS control for creating native packages (original ones or those based on existing sweets).

All packages on packages.sugarlabs.org split into several types:

regular OBS packages,
aliases that map native packages names of several GNU/Linux distributions into one OBS level name,
sweets built only for Zero Install usage,
native packages built based on sweets.

sweets.sugarlabs.org

It is being used to host Zero Install feeds produced from sweet sources. After being uploaded to obs.sugarlabs.org, a sweet source will be built on OBS, and the final result will be shared as Zero Install feeds on sweets.sugarlabs.org.

download.sugarlabs.org

All files, sources, and binaries, that are hosted or produced on obs.sugarlabs.org, will be finally copied to download.sugarlabs.org. This allows us to reuse the existing mirroring infrastructure.