Need Bundle activity (for handling zip files and other compressed/bundled formats)

[skierpage]

Summary: click on a .zip file in Browse, it appears in Journal but only Etoys offers to run it. Etoys can extract the zip contents to your drive but it's not integrated with the Journal or very Sugar-ized.

Steps to Reproduce: In Browse I went to http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/121 and clicked on the compressed HTML file http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext94/nabby11h.zip.

Browse downloaded the file, I found it in Journal.

In Journal, click the zip file and hover over Resume, only Etoys would open it.

Etoys displays a blank screen with a small menu at top left overlapping its menu strip asking whether to "open in zip viewer/extract all to..."

If I choose "extract all to..." Etoys shows a file picker and I can extract to, e.g. /olpc/home. The zip file seemed to disappear from the Journal and the extracted file doesn't appear in the Journal.

Then if I'm knowledgeable about the OLPC file system I can use Browse to navigate to the uncompressed content, e.g. file:///home/olpc/nabby11h.htm

If I instead choose "open in zip viewer", Etoys shows a gadget for handling zip files with several text action boxes with illegibly tiny characters.

Expected: I'm not sure, but this doesn't seem like the best UI for handling compressed files. The Etoys zip file handling has bugs and is not in the Sugar/Journal spirit, but it's the only workaround going.

[Eben]

Expected: An OLPC provided Bundle activity should be the primary handler for compressed filetypes. It should provide a visual interface for observing the contents and for moving all or part of these contents to the Journal or clipboard.

Here is a stub on the wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bundle_activity

Marco, can you estimate how much work this would be? I imagine, at least for zip files only (to start), this shouldn't be that difficult. Python already provides a module for this.

[marco]

Not that much work I think, but unlikely that the core team has resources to maintain more activities.

[skierpage]

FYI, XULRunner and thus Browse can view the contents of ZIP files using the jar: protocol. This is enough to let you directly view compressed files in the browser (letting you view a .xol content library bundle without unpacking it!), though not drag files out of them.

I don't know how easy it would be to make Browse view .zip/.jar/.xo/.xol contents. I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=502528 "Firefox should offer to view .ZIP archives using its jar: protocol handler" and http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1258 "enhancement: support browsing HTML content within bundles instead of unzipping them".

I guess this bug should be upstreamed.