[IAEP] Unified Objects (was Unified bundles)

[Wade Brainerd]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 9:12 AM, Eben Eliason <eben.eliason at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 2:20 AM, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
>> Proposal.
>>
>> To achieve this target, instead of inventing new versioning scheme in sugar
>> (in addition to Journal), I propose treat Activities as regular Journal objects.
>
> I'm a little confused by this comment, as this is already the case.
> Activities have entries in the Journal just as anything else does, and
> are, in fact, objects in that sense. They're "special" objects since
> they spawn fresh new objects by default, but the activity bundle is
> still an object in itself, and should be resumable with other
> activities which understand that object type (develop is one example;
> a future "bundle" (zip) activity would be another).

I think the Journal is capable of holding activity *bundles* as
objects.  But the actual activity that you launch lives in
/home/user/Activities or in /usr/share/sugar/activities and has no
connection back to its downloaded Journal object.

It sounds like Aleksey is proposing unpacking the activity bundles
into the Journal, which is a really interesting idea!  It would
certainly provide a future path for activity versioning, promote the
creation and modification of activities to be at the same level as
creating and modifying activity instances, allow users a way to
transfer their created activities around, etc.

My only concern is that it might blur activities and activity
instances for users, which could inhibit the conceptual development of
this important computer concept.

Cheers,
Wade