[sugar] Re: RFC: activity bundles

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 20:36:27 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
>   
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_Bundles
>>
>> Comments welcome.  Especially from you, Blizzard, since easily
>> installable and transferable activities is your baby :)
>>     
>
> Hey,
>
> A few assorted thoughts:
>
>
> * Host Versioning: I think it may be better to let activities
>   handle this themselves. Consider an activity that can run on
>   Sugar v1 but will use some new APIs added in Sugar v2 if
>   they are available. If this (critical) information is 
>   expressed via bundle metadata then Sugar itself will end up
>   displaying a generic message like:
>
>     "This activity is designed for a newer laptop. It will run on
>      yours but with reduced functionality"
>
>   But that might not be right! If the activity code itself takes
>   care of this (maybe helped by some convenience apis) then it can
>   take a more appropriate action. Maybe the new APIs it needs 
>   improve performance or looks but nothing else. It would be dumb 
>   to scare the user by mentioning this. On the other hand maybe
>   some critical feature won't work unless Sugar v2 is present.
>   It would be worth notifying the user exactly what won't work,
>   in that case.
>
>   None of this is possible if Sugar itself checks activity host
>   versioning.
>
>
>   

I think both should be possible. We don't know how the activities ABI 
will be changing yet and how much work will be necessary to support 
multiple versions of the platform (even degradating functionalities). I 
think in some cases requiring a certain platform version to install the 
activity will be the simpler solution.

> * SVG icons take a lot of CPU time to render, relative to uncompressed
>   bitmaps. Maybe there should be some support for noticing if they
>   change and caching them?
>
>   

Yep, I think so.

> * XML is fully specified and the edge cases are handled whereas an 
>   INF/.desktop style derivative isn't really. I know XML is ugly
>   but still ....
>   

Hmm not sure. Desktop files has some simple specification we might want 
to inherit:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/
Glib key files implementation is based on this.

Marco