[sugar] Activity versions

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 4:33 PM, Morgan Collett
<morgan.collett at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Jameson Chema Quinn
> <jquinn at cs.oberlin.edu> wrote:
>>
>> * 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.
>
> This reminds me of my pet issue about activity version numbers: There
> is no way to branch development. This is especially relevant with
> activities decoupled from the builds.
>
> For instance: Chat-35.xo is included in the Update.1 activity repo
> (http://mock.laptop.org/repos/local.update1/XOS/index.html). Chat-38
> will be the next development release, and will probably depend on new
> features in Sugar introduced since Update.1. What if we need a bugfix
> release for Update.1? What version will that be? If it is Chat-39,
> then Chat-38 and Chat-40 (perhaps another development release) would
> not be related to Chat-39 in any way.
>
> I think this is also an issue once Develop is available, since if I
> were to edit an activity in Develop and produce a bundle with the next
> version number as Jameson described, it would conflict with the next
> "real" release done by that activity's author.
>
> Since we struggle to get consensus on issues like a release
> name/number, can we get a discussion on the following bite sized
> pieces of an issue?
>
> * Is the current activity version numbering inadequate, as I am proposing?
> * Is changing it to (or allowing) a dotted numeric scheme (Chat-38.2)
> a good way to go?
> (For example, I might use odd numbers for development series and even
> numbers for stable releases - Chat-37.2 next, Chat-38 for Sucrose 0.82
> / OLPC 8.02) and Chat-35.1 for a bugfix for Update.1)

I'm ok with all this, even if I haven't devoted a good deal of thought to it.

> * Would that be an intrusive change?

Not using dotted version numbers, but supporting several versions of
the same bundle would be a bit invasive, although we certainly need to
do it at some point. We would need for the PS to support it though.

Thanks,

Tomeu