[Sugar-devel] Hypothetical sugar-0.90 material, draft 1.

[Bernie Innocenti]

El Thu, 10-06-2010 a las 14:24 -0400, Martin Langhoff escribió:
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
> <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> >>  - Reworking the datastore... while I welcome efforts in a new
> >> datastore... _every Sugar release has a new DS implementation_ and
> >> they get little testing and I've seen extremely light thinking about
> >> what is _actually_ needed.
> >
> > That's a very polite way of saying that you disagree with the extensive
> > thinking that's been done about datastore design and implementation for
> 
> No. _It says exactly what it says_. People have been thinking lots
> about the fun part of the problem, thinking superficially about what
> they'll have fun implementing. Not about the complete problem space.
> Not about what hits users. Not about what we need for a saner
> implementation.

I would tend to agree with Martin here.

Besides, the assumption that VCS-style deltas will work well with the
binary files stored by most Sugar activities is... wishful at best.

A design working in real-world scenarios would probably require ad-hoc
deltifiers for each file format, making it very complex, slow and
fragile.

Whether a generic versioned filesystem could ever become feasible,
remains a fascinating research subject for the next decade.

Perhaps we could slightly enhance the current datastore design to store
full copies of each version without any attempt to deltify them. This is
also how git started.

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