[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Activity version compatibility

[Wade Brainerd]

Hey Gary,

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 8:15 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:

> Hmmm. So what happens when Sugar depreciates some API and breaks old
> activities? Say in a year or so when the core folks decide to remove the old
> toolbar API code? Or perhaps some of Telepathy and its API which is getting
> rather overdue for a fix'er'upper effort?


Yikes I really hope this never happens - the old toolbar code just depends
on GTK, right?  And if we drop some part of the collaboration API, couldn't
the Sugar team at least include a compatibility shim?  I guess it'll always
come down to a decision about how many activities are being broken and how
likely they are to be fixed.


> 1) Do the work to maintain backwards compatibility
>>
>
> See this is where I'm at. I'm very tempted to go back and add the old
> toolbar support back into Write (I already did this for Calculate and it's
> not too painful, working on the same for Labyrinth just now). The core devs
> don't think this is worth the effort, because they want folks to move up to
> newer versions of Sugar (and get to use all the great new features they have
> worked on), but the Activity developers also want their activities to be a
> maximum benefit right now, which means supporting 0.82 for the ~98% of our
> user base right now.


Ok then, I'm inspired :)  Is there a list of the activities that have been
ported to the new toolbar design somewhere, which need compatibility code
written?  It didn't seem trivial for Terminal, but it's only a few dozen
lines of code after all.

If it's just for developers that want to specifically warn that their
>> activity won't work. Why not let them just pop in a try/except around the
>> sensitive API and show an alert within their Activity? If they already know
>> enough to know it will fail, they'll know where and why.
>
>
Yep - an alert would work, or if there were a way for the activity to pass a
human readable launch failure message back to the launcher window we would
be all set.

-Wade
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