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

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Jul 4, 2007, at 20:18 , John (J5) Palmieri wrote:

> On Tue, 2007-07-03 at 23:47 +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> 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.

Exactly. Why would you artificially limit creativity? How can you  
foresee today what people will want to do with XO bundles 5 years  
from now?

> The fact that it is a zip archive is purely coincidental.

I thought it has to do with being the most widely supported archive  
format. I thought it is in the spirit of OLPC that it could easily be  
created on any major OS today - all you need to produce a bundle is a  
text editor and zip.

> 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.

Sure. And it's of course valid to encourage people to use the tools.  
But the tools should not impose gratuitous restrictions on what you  
can do.

> 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.

No disagreement here.

> 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.

Ugh, who decides that? This would make it *much* harder to produce or  
examine an XO bundle without special tools.

- Bert -