[Sugar-devel] Changing bundle_id and version scheme for Etoys

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 18:21 -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:

> This is a nicely decentralized mechanism for choosing identifiers
> which are guaranteed by construction never to conflict.

It is indeed a simple and nice scheme, but why is such uniqueness a
desiderable feature when developers can--and in fact *do*--often
distribute forks of existing activities?

Lucian has just created a fork of Browse and ParaguayEduca has a fork of
XoIRC and VncLauncher on its wiki. In all cases, the bundle_id was
intentionally left unmodified to ensure upgrades would work.

(if the bundle_id were instead changed, funny things would happen when a
user tries to install both bundles on the same machine).


> If sugarlabs is willing to maintain a mechanism for ensuring
> uniqueness, feel free to prepend org.sugarlabs to whatever activities
> you have "registered".

A good surrogate could be that no two activities with the same name can
be uploaded to ASLO.

Without a fancy scheme for signed bundles, nothing forbids people from
distributing bundles with conflicting names from other sites, regardless
of what uniqueness scheme gets chosen.


> > For all other purposes, the bundle_id is just a string which could
> > contain anything. The bundle_id "org.tuxpaint.sugar-is-lame" worked
> > flawlessly for all this time.
> 
> Yes, this identifier is childish, but conforms precisely to the rules
> outlined above, which ensure its uniqueness.

It's not actually conforming, it has hyphens! ;-)

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