Re: New gnome-sdk images with gnome-builder app bundle

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On tor, 2015-01-15 at 17:58 +0800, Cosimo Cecchi wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 5:15 PM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>
> wrote:
>         For instance, is telepathy in the platform? libchamplain?
>         libwnck?
>         libgweather? I dunno. There are no obvious answers here.
>
>
> Yes, we definitely need to become more formal about this definition in
> the context of GNOME.
> FWIW, jhbuild has currently a distinction between
> "gnome-devel-platform" and "gnome-extended-devel-platform" [1], even
> though they don't look particularly curated.
>
>
> It's of course better to start small and then expand rather than the
> opposite, but without getting into the specifics too much, the example
> of Telepathy is something I would include in the platform, since from
> the client perspective it's convenient to have one contact store
> managed by the OS and one defined API to access it; it also makes it
> possible to have a "contacts" kind of permission in the sandbox.

I don't really know telepathy all that well, but how well would it be
amendable to some level of sandboxing? I guess with kdbus we could ship
the client libraries and they would just error out completely if we
forbid the client talking to the telepathy daemon well known name. 

Could we do something between "full access" and "nothing" though?

Are the telepathy dbus ABIs backwards compatible? For instance, if I
have some installed app that ships the 3.16 client libraries, but the
host is running the 3.18 dbys services, is this guaranteed to work? This
is something we have to start guaranteeing for things we bundle in the
runtime.

Also, this essentially adds a new requirement on the host os session
when running this particular runtime (has telepathy >= 3.16 installed).
This is probably not a huge issue, but something that has to be
considered and recorded for each bundled thing that uses some form of
IPC (like dbus) with the host session.

> I personally think only four are currently worth including: gjs, vala,
> python and gtkmm.
> With regards to python, I tend to agree with you on where the line
> should be drawn, even though I am not an expert on the details of its
> standard library; in general I think it would be an interesting
> exercise to put together a minimal build with whatever is necessary to
> get pygobject running.
> Note that I believe python is a direct dependency for
> gobject-introspection to be able to build an introspected library,
> which some applications will want to do.

Python *is* in the Sdk (via the yocto base), so building introspected
libraries should work right now. 

If you want to experiment with adding python to the platform that should
be pretty simple. In gnome-sdk-images, run "make images" to build the
yocto base, then edit:
gnome-continuous-yocto/meta-gnomeos/recipies-core/tasks/task-gnomeos-contents-platform.bb
by moving stuff from:
gnome-continuous-yocto/meta-gnomeos/recipies-core/tasks/task-gnomeos-contents-sdk.bb

For instance, you could move python3-dev, python3-modules and
python3-misc over and rebuild. Then see what changes this made in the
size of the images (yocto-build/x86_64/images/*) and what got changed in
the image manifest:
yocto-build/x86_64/tmp-glibc/deploy/images/qemux86-64/gnomeos-contents-platform-qemux86-64.manifest

I agree with your list above though, the gtkmm case is pretty similar to
vala, and python3 is I believe the most widely used scripting language
to build gnome3 apps, including a lot of things in the devel platform
(like gdbus-codegen, g-o-i, etc). So it makes sense to have there.

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl redhat com            alexander larsson gmail com 
He's a time-tossed zombie photographer with a mysterious suitcase 
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