[Sugar-devel] OLPC updates from ASLO

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 01.12.2009, at 18:13, Aleksey Lim wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Dec 01, 2009 at 07:51:32AM +0000, Daniel Drake wrote:
>> 2009/12/1 Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org>:
>>> AFAIK OLPC will use 0.84 release and will lack of native sugar updater
>>> but it could be useful idea to keep activities repository in one place.
>> 
>> We are using the sugar control panel applet for activity updates as we
>> have done before.
>> 
>>> So, the question is will html page which lists all ASLO activities in
>>> microformat enough for OLPC updater.
>> 
>> Having the microformat on ASLO would be great and I never understood
>> why this wasn't the approach taken in the first place, rather than the
>> considerable task of adding some strange XML format support to the
>> updater applet for later versions.
>> 
>> The great thing about the microformat is that not only did it provide
>> an interface for those of us single-users who have fast internet
>> connections, it was designed inherently for simplicity, scalability
>> and replication, and came with a decent amount of documentation of how
>> you would replicate this on a deployment. The XML thing seems to be
>> lacking in those areas.
>> 
>> However I think there are 2 additional things that would block moving
>> the activity group to ASLO:
>> 1. It's not possible to create a group with specific locked versions,
>> right? One reason for doing it separately is that we want to control
>> the flow of activity updates pushed to customers. I'm concerned that
>> activities are not seeing much QA or testing and regressions are too
>> easy to come by. I'm also concerned that the amount of testing that
>> developers do on 0.84 before marking activities as 0.84-compatible
>> will decrease over the next few months/years.
> 
> ASLO has several levels of "QA", all public activities(reviewed by
> editors) should work(w/o obvious faults), public activities could be
> featured by editor, editor collections of public activities. So, we can
> utilize this scheme for OLPC needs.
> 
>> 2. No content bundle support
> 
> Yeah, but thats the question should we mix activities and other kinds
> of sugar objects. Different types could require different UI or
> different uploading scheme.
> 
> -- 
> Aleksey

This new update scheme came as a surprise to me too. Guess I have not payed enough attention. 

Does it completely ignore the bundle's update_url?

Is there any documentation for activity authors besides the feature proposal?

	http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Sugar_Update_Control_ASLO

At least the example given there does not seem to work:

	http://activities.sugarlabs.org/services/update.php?id=org.laptop.WebActivity&appVersion=0.86

It returns a basically empty XML file.

- Bert -