Platform Team/Package Management System

Detailed Description

This proposal assumes that the core of sugar development(in common sense) is variety of developers rather then developers who are taking part in sugar core(glucose) development. So, it's all about seeing from activity/3rd-party developers.

From such new core POV, sugar development process will look like:

• variety of sugar activities
• that use Sugar Services

So, developers use a set of services that have theirs own API changes based schedules. Existed glucose could be treated as a big service and splited to several components but thats not a task for this proposal. Instead, it's about proposing basic infrastructure of Sugar Services and several services that are not part of glucose.

The corner stone of Sugar Services proposal is Saccharin service. This service provides installing/upgrading(via Zero Install integration) mechanism for all other services. The rest of services is just variety of sugar libraries/dbus-services.

Technically, service could be a part of glucose(or some of its releases) but from activity POV it doesn't make much sense, if activity requires some service, saccharin will do nothing if requested service/version is a part of installed glucose or install proper service(via 0install). Various activities on the same system could use various versions of the same service, in that case saccharin(via 0install) will just provide proper version to particular activity.

List of services

Service	Version	Contacts	Notes
saccharin	0.0	User:alsroot	core service
widgets	0.0	User:alsroot	GUI layer which assimilates various sugar releases changes e.g. let activity developers use new toolbars even in 0.82 environment and do not use many ifs in code, and provides useful widgets for sugar activity developers
...

Versioning scheme

Each service has API changes based versioning scheme

<major-version>.<minor-version>

• the major version starts from 0(premature state) and describes API backwards compatibility breakage
• the minor version is for bugfixes and features that don't break backwards compatibility

Benefit to Sugar

Make sugar environment more straightforward by decoupling core from other stuff and using tough and well maintainable dbus API to let activities run on all (in ideal) deployed Sugar platforms.

Documentation

• Michael Stone's email
• Future of Zero Sugar