[sugar] Pippy VS Develop

[Jameson "Chema" Quinn]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 4:51 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpgritti at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I'm trying to form my opinion about inclusion of Pippy and Develop in
> Sucrose 0.82.
>
> Here is my understanding:
>
> * Pippy is well maintained and tested but it's supposed to be just a
> stop gap solution. For the future we will be focusing on Develop.
> * Develop is not very mature and tested yet. Jameson is the only
> developer and he is not sure if he is going to be able to keep doing
> it.
>
> I'm sure I didn't get this quite right, so please step in and correct me :)
>
> Marco
>

You are pretty much right. I would add one point: that currently, the main
flaws in develop are all, really, flaws in glucose (and/or fructose, see
below):

* Cannot open an activity bundle from standard journal, only run it. (patch
exists)
* Cannot have two versions of an activity bundle installed at once (dev and
stable) while debugging - esp. necessary for working on Develop itself.
Also, you are forced to churn the activity.info version number (upwards or
downwards, it doesn't matter) every debug cycle, because "same version"
silently fails to install.
* Activity bundle format is not well-enforced (no warnings), so many
activities have noncompliant bundles; this can lead to data loss in Develop.
(this is what I meant by including fructose above)
* Datastore is unreliable. This led to a major dataloss bug in the past
which "magically fixed itself", and to a separate minor one in the present
(sometimes, save fails non-silently; activity complains, gives choice of
halting exit, and later saves properly) which has not been resolved. Without
a reimplemented datastore, a la tomeu's quickie, this does not lend
confidence.

These are really the only high-priority outstanding issues with develop as
it stands (aside from translation and broader testing). And the process of
code review does not appear to be working for me, I have a patch for the
first of these issues which has languished for months. From where I'm
sitting, it would be nice if checkin capability on joyride were more
liberally granted (with some specific community norms about self-review),
and the strict third-party review requirement were a filter when
cherrypicking changes FROM joyride, not into it.

As to whether I will be able to continue: hopefully, this will be resolved
within a couple of weeks.

Jameson
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