[Sugar-devel] Try out version support NOW ;)

[Sascha Silbe]

Hi everyone!

Good news: I've finally managed to find fixes and workarounds for all 
bugs I discovered so far in the version support "fork" of Sugar, 
including the major ones that made trying it out a bumpy ride.

So if you are running sugar-jhbuild (*) and you'd like to try out how 
version support might change your life, here's your chance [1]:


1. Backup (DON'T skip this!)

If you've used Sugar before, it is _highly_ recommended to create a 
backup of your data store as it will be updated on first startup and 
cannot be read by older versions of Sugar afterwards:

cp -a ~/.sugar/default/datastore ~/.sugar/default/datastore.v2


2. Switch to version support:

Replace moduleset = 'sugar' with moduleset = 'sugar-versionsupport' in 
sugar-jhbuild/sugar.jhbuildrc.

Move away the old sources for the sugar, sugar-datastore and 
sugar-toolkit packages (JHBuild cannot switch between different git 
modules):

cd sugar-jhbuild
for pkg in sugar{,-datastore,-toolkit} ; do
      mv "${pkg}" "${pkg}-upstream"
done

Get and build the new sources:

cd sugar-jhbuild
./sugar-jhbuild updateone sugar{,-datastore,-toolkit}
./sugar-jhbuild buildone sugar{,-datastore,-toolkit}


3. Usage

Run as usual:

cd sugar-jhbuild
./sugar-jhbuild run sugar-emulator --fullscreen

Please note that it's based on my VNC support branch, so instead of 
Xephyr you'll get a VNC viewer. You shouldn't notice much of a 
difference, with the exception of non-US keyboards working properly. To 
bring up the VNC menu press F8.


The only visible difference is that the date field in the Journal 
details view is now a ComboBox instead of a read-only text field - 
meaning that you can select (and resume!) older versions of an entry. As 
the current data store doesn't support versions all previously existing 
entries will have only a single version, obviously. So in order to try 
it out you'll need to resume some entry, modify and save (switch away 
from / close) it.

I intended to play with an idea Caspar and I had about about how to 
present versions to the user (namely undo/redo buttons inside 
activities) but got delayed by technical difficulties so they won't make 
it into the thesis (meaning I will work on that only after a significant 
delay). Speaking of which: I'm concentrating on the text part (i.e. the 
actual thesis) now, so while I highly appreciate (and kindly request) 
feedback of any form please don't be offended if it takes a long time 
for me to reply.


(*) Sebastian has kindly offered to help me build a custom SoaS but for 
scheduling reasons I need to postpone that for some time, sorry.
[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Version_support_for_datastore/Howto

CU Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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