.xo bundles (was Re: #1803 HIGH Trial-2: Add Chat activity to builds)

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Tue, 2007-07-03 at 23:47 +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> > Comment (by J5):
> >
> >  Replying to [comment:4 bert]:
> >> Replying to [comment:3 J5]:
> >>> This was generated incorrectly.  First the version should be -9  
> >>> second
> >  the activity should be Chat-9.xo.  It looks like it was simply  
> > zipped up
> >  instead of using the packaging tools.
> >>
> >> Not sure what else is wrong, but simply zipping up is surely as  
> >> valid as
> >  using whatever tools there are, right?
> >
> >  No, right now it works but in the future there is no guarantee as  
> > we may
> >  do post processing. Also python setup.py dist creates a clean package
> >  without any of the stray development files (such as MacOS resource  
> > files)
> >  getting packaged up.
> 
> Such garbage should not be included obviously. But I'd much prefer if  
> bundles stay simple zip files without added magic. What kind of "post  
> processing" do you imagine that could not be easily done manually?
> 
Give people a generic mechanism and they do crazy things.  The fact that
it is a zip archive is purely coincidental.  What defines an activity
bundle is not the compression format but the contents within.  In order
to keep that integrity we have tools which do various checks to make
sure the bundle contents are correct.  They also take the guesswork away
from naming and may in the future have the ability to automatically sign
the package and take sha1 snapshots of all the files so it can
reassemble the package for installation on another XO.  All this can be
done by hand but humans make mistakes (such as forgetting a step) which
are easily caught by scripts.   

In autotools land we could simply just bundle up a CVS repository and
call it a release but often this causes the application to not compile
correctly which is why we have make dist and make dist-check.  The tools
used to create bundles are there for similar purposes.  It allows you to
do development within the bundle itself but release a clean version for
others to use.

BTW We now have an official registered mime type "vnd.olpc-sugar" which
specifies "XO" as the magic key to identify the mime type.  At some
point the PK in the zip header will change to XO. 

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>