[sugar] Updating third-party activities

[Michael Burns]

The topic came up in #sugar today about the process of updating activities
that were not shipped with the image (for lack of a better term,
"third-party activities"). There are two standard ways:

1. Join a shared activity that is using a newer version of code than you
have
2. You download a .XO from the web and it installs overtop an existing
(signed by the same key, etc) activity. You can optionally uninstall that
activity from the journal, before doing this.

The question that came up (#3), is how to distribute updates to these
activities in mass instead of having the user be required to go find the
latest version and manually compare (push/notify vs. pull). Installin
activities will put dated, potentially buggy pieces of code (bitfrost or
not, broken features ruin the user experience) on these machines with no
good ways of getting at newer, improved versions of that code.

What is planned way to solve this? Could we add a field to the activity's
metadata file about where hosting server is to check for newer versions of
the .xo file? SJ described it on IRC as:

step 1 : check all known bundle repositories, ask for updates to your
> installed bundles
> step 2 : collate the results by flag (importance / type of upgrade)
> step 3 : confirm signatures for those the user chooses to install
>

Thoughts?

-- 
Michael Burns * Student
Open Source {Education} Lab
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