[Sugar-devel] MANIFEST pointlessness

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 16:32, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> El Fri, 02-07-2010 a las 15:54 +1000, James Cameron escribió:
>
>> A fascinating meaning of the word MANIFEST that I had not previously
>> encountered.  That sounds like an INVENTORY.
>>
>> What's the point of a file that is automatically generated?
>
> None, this is why I removed it.
>
> IIRC, the original plan was to make the MANIFEST contain hashes, so it
> could be used for integrity checking and to update activities by
> downloading only deltas.
>
> In 3 years, nobody ever got around to implement any of these advanced
> features... And in case anyone ever did, the current MANIFEST format
> would have to be redesigned anyway.
>
> To simplify the life of activity authors, we should simply remove any
> mention of it from the documentation and maybe teach setup.py to
> generate bundles out of git ls-files.

Maybe Gary and/or Wade can give the opinion of the Activity Team on this?

> Meanwhile, SoaS, USR and the new ARM-based XO laptop are pressing hard
> for switching from xo bundles to a full-featured packaging system, which
> would also solve the problem that the MANIFEST was supposed to address.

Would be good to have some way of tracking what needs to be solved
before we can do the switch. Two questions off the top of my head are
how first-time activity authors are going to package their software
and also what those people will have to do to modify an activity
installed in their system. (But maybe not discuss these in this
thread?).

Regards,

Tomeu

> --
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>
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