joyride 2128 smoketest

[Morgan Collett]

2008/7/9 Kim Quirk <kim at laptop.org>:
> With almost 400,000 deployed in the world, we need to have some good
> discussions on the backward compatibilty and upgradability of Activities.
>
> Some of the bugs Charlie is writing up from the QA first look at joyride may
> be answered by upgrading an activity to a newer one.
>
> So here are the questions we need to discuss:
>
> 1 - Is there anyway to ensure backward compatibility of activities (the
> 8.1.1 activities will work with 8.2)?  -- seems like a long shot to me.

My 2c worth here... There haven't been API breaks for activities. I've
had to do nothing to my activities to keep them working from 8.1.0 to
joyride current.

Chat-35 was in 656, and should still work on 708 or 212x. Chat-42
however will probably fail on older builds. So I'm concerned about the
reverse direction: That someone with 656 will try to install an
activity that only works with newer API added in newer releases...

We need a decent activity portal, as has been discussed in the past,
so people can install activities appropriate to the version/build they
are running. Right now, it's difficult to know whether a given
activity on the wiki is compatible with a given release, or obtain
other versions of it.

> 2 - For support purposes, do we need or want to say that activities will be
> backward compatible only across the year designator (8.1 activities will
> work with 8.2; but from 8.x to 9.x, the activities will need to be updated
> and probably retested and checked for new translations).

I think we need a way to associate activities with releases, either by
some sort of activity repository that "Bert's script" can access, or
some sort of list of versions... IMO the activities should always be
tested at least by the activity author (and core activities tested by
QA) and should always be updated for new translations.

> 3 - Since I think it is going to be really hard to do either 1 or 2 above,
> then we have to have a strategy for easy activity upgrades. We've talked
> about this for a long time... do we have a proposal that we can really
> implement as part of the 8.2 release?

Regards,
Morgan