[IAEP] Quick "Dumb Question"

[Aleksey Lim]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 10:38:33PM +1300, Tabitha Roder wrote:
> >
> > > When Sugar Labs says an Activity works with "0.82-0.88", how does that
> > translate to the OLPC builds like 10.1.3?
> >
> 
> Perhaps it might be useful to know how to tell what your XO has - for me to
> check this is what I do: from the activity ring I right click on the X in
> the middle and choose "settings" and then "about my computer". Then I can
> see if I have 0.84 or some other number like that.
> 
> 
> imho, at the end, that was wrong step with exposing sugar version on
> > activities.sugarlabs.org. It is technical/internal stuff that peopel who
> > launch activities should not bother about (it should just start proper
> > version, installing proper dependencies). There is an ongoing work to
> > implemnet excatly this scheme, so people won't do the job (resolving
> > version/dependency related issues) by themselves, computers do that
> > much better.
> >
> 
> I think it is useful if there is a way for volunteers to easily grab a big
> "collection" of activities that will work on the laptops at the deployment
> they are going to. This is particularly important when going to a deployment
> that has no internet (or a whole country with almost no internet). We put
> activities on the school server and later realised that some wouldn't work
> as they were for other versions of Sugar.

This scenario is really doable in non-human interaction manner (ie, not
how it is implemented for now). btw sugar version is not only one issue
here (and not the most painful, most of activities are 0.82-0.90
compatible), more painful are external dependencies and binary based
activity (eg, activities that being build against fedora-11 may not work
for other fedora versions). All these issues are stumbling-blocks for
sugar (if we are talking about sugar as not only about a system for
only-usage scenario). So, this is ongoing task to implement for Platform
Team.

> activities automatically put into a collection if they work on a given Sugar
> version?

For now (on activities-testing.sugarlabs.org, during the next week it will
be pushed to production), there is a way to get collection content in
microformat:

    http://activities-testing.sugarlabs.org/services/micro-format.php?collection_nickname=fructose&sugar=0.88

* if activity version was not set in collection and sugar request
  argument wasn't passed, then return recent activity version
* if activity version was not set in collection and sugar request
  argument was passed, then return either recent activity version only
  for this sugar or nothing
* if activity version was set in collection, regardless sugar request
  argument, exactly this version will be returned

Dextorse-2 updater uses this feature and it could be used in other workflows as well.

> I completely agree that it is really confusing having Sugar versions and
> those 10.1.X numbers, especially since we also have to deal with the release
> number like 852 or 439, and then you add letters like dx for dextrose or au
> for Australia. Simplifying this for everyone or having a wiki page that
> helps it all make sense would be useful.
> 
> Tabitha

-- 
Aleksey