Taste the Rainbow:0.7.8

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Revision as of 22:44, 24 January 2008 by Mstone (talk | contribs)
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This page is a guided tour of the source code of the rainbow-0.7.8 release.

Source Code Overview

Please start in my rainbow-0.7.8 tree.

 ./
  |--- README : Standard boilerplate about where work gets done; somewhat dated in this release.
  |--- rainbow.spec.in : spec-file template for building RPMS
  |--- Makefile.package : package-specific variables for use in ../Makefile.fedora
  |--- conf : installation-time configuration files
  |     \--- session-olpc.conf : applies some unusual dbus rules to allow many uids
  |                              to use the same session bus and enables OLPC-specific 
  |                              dbus access checks. When /etc/olpc-security exists, 
  |                              session-olpc.conf is loaded by /usr/bin/sugar 
  | 
  |--- docs : explanations & notes
  |     |--- NOTES : various problems I have encountered and thoughts on how to solve them.
  |     *--- rainbow.txt : a sketch & justification of the current design
  |
  \--- rainbow : source code
        |--- util : functions wrapping frequently used idioms or useful syscalls
        |--- inject.py : logic implementing activity launching
        \--- service.py : dbus service entry-point

Activity Launching

The key functions for launching activities are

These functions are called in the order listed from

which which is, in turn, called from

These six functions (and the relatively simple helpers they call) exhaust the functionality provided by rainbow-0.7.4.

Developing Rainbow

I develop Rainbow in four basic modes:

  • By packaging snapshots of a git clone to try out packaging changes.
 make snapshot
  • With locally-built or scratch-built packages, when I'm getting ready to tag a release.
 make release