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

[Hal Murray]

> Actually these are the exact same problems that could be solved much  better
> with some kind of per activity DS (not the Android one, which  would be a
> little bit overkill). I mean that even making or not making  deltas is
> dependent on the object the activity stores and the deltifier  is also
> activity object dependent. Also the single file or multi files  thing is
> activity dependent and so on. So you can implement every  possible feature
> in a global glorified DS but I personally do not think  that you will reach
> a really usable general DS ever. 

Whatever you do for the DS, it needs to be (very) easy to understand and 
(very) easy to explain, both to implementers and to users.

Compression/delta schemes add another concept to the chain.  Who is going to 
explain how it works to the end users?  Sure, it's easy after you understand 
it, but there are lots of opportunities for things to fall through the cracks 
and the results can be nasty.

Perhaps I'm overly sensitive to this area.   30+ years ago, I deleted a 
critical file.  It was large and I needed the space and it wasn't obvious (to 
me) that the file was needed after step X.  Things worked for a long long 
time.  Then they broke with an obscure error message.  (which was a lot 
better than it could have been)

In hindsight, it only took a few seconds to explain what was going on.  But 
that was after I got the right guy on the phone, stepped through the debugger 
for a while, and then gave him the critical piece of info about deleting the 
file.

[Insert standard joke about fools being so ingenious.]  How many ingenious 
"fools" will be using Sugar?  I hope there will be a lot of them.


-- 
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.