[Sugar-devel] Backwards compatible Browse

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 01:00, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
> I cloned Browse v114 and spent a few hours hacking on backwards
> compatibility.  I added compatibility fallbacks for the toolbars and a
> few other modules.
>
> The repository is here:
> http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/browse/repos/backwards-compatibility
>
> On OLPC build 8.2.0, the patched Browse v114 starts and basically
> works.  A few features like typeahead find are broken and beyond my
> ability to trivially fix, but someone with more experience hacking
> XPCOM could probably figure it out quickly.
>
> Is there any interest in re-forging the compatibility chain, so that
> the latest Browse will work on old versions of Sugar?

I think there's interest. Have given a look at your modifications and
have these comments:

+# If GConf is not available, automatic server authentication is disabled.
+try:
+    import gconf
+except ImportError:
+    pass

was automatic server authentication working in any way in 0.82? If so,
I guess we need to fix it (maybe we were using something else than
GConf back then?)

+    try:
+        client = gconf.client_get_default()
+    except NameError:
+        return

I would define HAS_GCONF, like you have done with the toolbars.

+if not NEW_TOOLBARS:
+    _TOOLBAR_EDIT = 1
+    _TOOLBAR_BROWSE = 2

I think we should try to not mix the main code with the compatibility
one. Otherwise the code in activities will get quite more messy and
when we decide to drop some of it we'll have more risk to introduce
regressions.

Nice work,

Tomeu

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