[Sugar-devel] Activity Versioning - Dotted Scheme

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 30.11.2009, at 21:24, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> 
> On 30.11.2009, at 20:02, Aleksey Lim wrote:
>> 
>> On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 07:49:15PM +0100, Simon Schampijer wrote:
>>> On 11/30/2009 10:00 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>>> On 29.11.2009, at 20:50, Simon Schampijer wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Well, if an activity will work for an older release is not only
>>>>> determined by the activity version number. For example, activities that
>>>>> moved to the new toolbar design are not working for older releases<
>>>>> 0.86. I don't think we can always avoid breaking backwards compatibility.
>>>> 
>>>> But so far we have managed to make is at least *possible* for an activity author to have a single activity version run under all Sugar versions. This would be the first instance where the author would not have that chance.
>>>> 
>>>> I'm pretty sure we can find a scheme that both allows a single activity bundle to provide dotted version numbers for new Sugar, but keep working in old Sugar.
>>>> 
>>>> E.g., we do not have to re-use the "activity_version" field if that breaks the parsing in older versions. It could be a new field named "dotted_activity_version" or simply "version" or something else. An activity author who cared could then provide both, a decimal and a dotted activity version.
>>>> 
>>>> - Bert -
>>> 
>>> Sorry, for the mixup. Yes we could add a way for the dotted version 
>>> number, and your idea sounds good. How does Bert's idea from above 
>>> sounds to others?
>> 
>> +1, but maybe use "activity_release"(or so) instead of "dotted_activity_version",
>> the full version in 0.88+ will be <activity_version>.<activity_release>?
> 
> That would link the old and new version field - I thought of them as being independent. Basically, the old activity_version field would be a like a build number, increasing for every build, as we did before. It would be optional in Sugar 0.88. The "real" user-visible version number would be the dotted one in a different field.
> 
> An activity author who wants to support both could keep incrementing activity_version, and assign dotted version numbers independently.
> 
> - Bert -

Thinking about this, for Etoys it doesn't really make a difference. We can as well switch to the dotted-only scheme.

So unless other activity authors feel backwards compatibility is needed, just use whatever is simplest.

Is this already written up as a feature? Couldn't find it.

- Bert -