[Sugar-devel] Activity Versioning (Was Re: [RELEASE] Terminal v24)

[Wade Brainerd]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 17:00, Eben Eliason <eben at laptop.org> wrote:
>> Here is some (OK, a lot) of background reading on the subject.  I
>> still cast my vote for a major/minor distinction, as mentioned in my
>> response on the second thread below.
>>
>> http://www.mail-archive.com/devel@lists.laptop.org/msg11149.html
>> http://www.mail-archive.com/sugar@lists.laptop.org/msg03283.html
>
> That's also my favorite right now.

I actually have the exact opposite instinct, coming at it from the
user's perspective.  The best choice for *users* is to keep the
linearly incrementing version, and document which activity versions
work with which Sugar versions.  The activities.sugarlabs.org system
already has an easy way to see what application versions an activity
version works with.

We should strive to ensure that newer versions of activities will work
with older versions of Sugar or else fail gracefully.  Eben's idea to
show activity startup failure information on the launcher screen would
help a lot with the "fail gracefully" part.

Being able to "branch" activities would perhaps help the Sugar
development team.  But for the users, in this situation it would be
best to make a new Terminal 25 that works with 0.86 and 0.84, and then
update 0.84 to reference that.

Think about it this way- someone with 0.84 can go *right now* and
download Terminal v24 or later.  So why can't we just update 0.84 to
reference Terminal v24+ if a bug is found in v23?

Regards,
Wade