[Sugar-devel] Activity updater

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:13 AM, Ties Stuij <cjstuij at gmail.com> wrote:
> - atm the updater checks both the pages supplied by the urls in the
> relevant groups file and the update url entry in the activity.info
> file of the installed bundle. Whichever of them is higher, wins the
> contract, so to say. The problem here is that the version linked by
> the activity.info file might: a) not work with the current build. b)
> be buggy. A sugar environment deployment doesn't have any influence

The simple solution, which was on my to-be-implemented list and is
even documented on the activity update pages (i think), is to add
allow 'pinning'.  The design was to have one more field in the
activity group page which determined whether the activity should be
pinned at the specific version or not.

The other not-yet-implemented feature was to allow the group page to
*uninstall* activities.  This is necessary to properly handle things
like activity renaming or merging.  A special version number of 0
could be used to indicate this; or there might be some other natural
way to express it.

Both of these were features that were on the roadmap, but I couldn't
fit all the features I wanted into the first 8.2 release.

> - There's no way to downgrade activities through the updater. Imagine
> one accidentally puts a version of an activity on the XO that's
> broken. The current updater will only install versions that are newer,
> not older. So there's no way to control that. I'd rather see the XO's
> adhere to what the groups file dictates, if the activities are
> included.

Pinning solves this problem, too.  It says, "install *exactly* this version".

> - I'd like to see some sort of delete function. This is more a

See above.  You're reading my mind!
  --scott

ps: here's the terse note explaining pinning:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_update#For_deployments -- I think
there are also some references in the source code.

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )