[Sugar-devel] multiple activity versions installed simultaneously (was Re: [Bugs] #1042 UNSP: cannot install new activity version)

[Eben Eliason]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Benjamin M.
Schwartz<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Martin Dengler wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 09:26:58PM +0545, Daniel Drake wrote:
>>> 2009/8/10 Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org>:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> any opinions on this?
>>> I dislike the idea of having multiple versions installed at
>>> once. The argument I saw for this case was that different versions
>>> might have incompatibilities in their collaboration protocols.
>>>
>>> Are there other reasons?
>>
>> Learner-generated activity patches, perhaps?  Like, we're under a tree
>> and here's my patched Terminal/Pippy/Speak that you may want to try
>> but not commit to blowing-away your "official" version...
>
> I agree... and this is why we need to have real activity versioning
> support.  The plan has always been to piggyback activity multiversion
> support on top of the datastore's versioning capabilities, and until that
> has landed, in my view, there's not much we can do.

I think I agree with both Ben and Tomeu, here. Supporting multiple
activity versions is crucial to allowing kids to modify activities, or
create their own. At the same time, I also believe that a new owner
(as in the example of modifying the Speak activity under a tree)
should result in a new activity "thread". That is, the resulting
activity would actually be version one of (potentially) many. For this
reason, encouraging a name change when ownership changes might be
apropos.

Eben