[Sugar-devel] Activity Versioning - Dotted Scheme

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 01:42, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 04:38:56PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I've created
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Dotted_Activity_Versions
> and wrote several options of your proposal(how I understood it)
> in http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Dotted_Activity_Versions#Detailed_Description
>
> Also I pushed it to "Feature Ready for Release Manager" group though
> this feature doesn't meet all requirements(there is no owner, I guess it
> will be trivial to code it) but it let us do not forget about this
> feature.

Thanks a lot for entering the feature page. Do we have any consensus
on which alternative is best?

Regards,

Tomeu

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