[Sugar-devel] Nobody understands "Keep"

[Gary C Martin]

On 11 Jul 2009, at 19:15, Edward Cherlin wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 2:28 AM, Tomeu Vizoso<tomeu at sugarlabs.org>  
> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 05:41, Eben Eliason<eben at laptop.org> wrote:
>>>>>>> On Thu, 2009-07-09 at 10:45 +0100, Martin Dengler wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 09:52:23AM +0100, Daniel Drake wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Nobody in the world seems to understand the Keep button.  
>>>>>>>>> People think
>>>>>>>>> it's for regular saving and you should do it before you  
>>>>>>>>> close or switch
>>>>>>>>> away from your activity.
>
>>>>>>> As far as I understand it, Keep is useful for these types of  
>>>>>>> scenarios:
>>>>>>> - you've done a lot of work but now it's time to refactor/ 
>>>>>>> reorganize the
>>>>>>> whole thing. However you want to keep a copy of the rough  
>>>>>>> version you
>>>>>>> have now, as "insurance" or perhaps for reference while you re- 
>>>>>>> mangle
>>>>>>> the work.
>>>>>>> - you've made a template for something, now you want to save  
>>>>>>> that
>>>>>>> template (as a blank template) before starting on a version  
>>>>>>> where you
>>>>>>> fill in the content.
>
> I use Keep in Turtle Art when I am building multiple programs that I
> want to use in lessons. When I have one working as I want, I click
> Keep. Then I can edit the program to create something related, or toss
> it and start fresh.

Regarding the current implementation of "Keep", I would NOT recommend  
you use this work flow!!

I did much the same last year with TurtleArt, working through 20 or so  
Logo examples that Uruguay had blogged about for lesson plans (I  
wanted to see how far TA would go using old Logo examples, I think sin/ 
cos stuff back then was the first blocker).

Any way, back to my story, after the first 20 or so the exercises were  
getting tougher and I wanted to refer back to earlier solutions so I  
could combine them. If you've been using "Keep", your trail of entries  
are all considered by the Sugar shell as "the same activity" (all have  
the same activity_id). If you try to resume an instance of "the same  
activity" more than once (for reference/comparison), Sugar shell will  
just switch you to the already instance activity. To refer to any  
earlier version you will have to "Stop" your current version, resume  
the other version, work out what you wanted to see, try to remember  
it, "Stop" again, find your current version again and resume it.

In the end I found I had to take a screenshot of every TA pervious  
project version, so that I could switch from an active TA version to  
an old screenshot for reference. It was a major pain, especially as  
back then you had to view images in Browse, and that browse was  
raising "Keep Error" every time you closed!

I gave up working on those TA/Logo class lesson plans not long after.

Regards,
--Gary