Activity Backward Compatibility (was re: Re: joyride 2128 smoketest)

[Greg Smith]

Hi Guys,

We should definitely have backward compatibility for activities!

That is, activities that used to work (maybe starting at 656) must
continue to work. If a new release requires that all activity authors
have to recode some of their work, that will be a major deterrent to
working with us.

Its also a deterrent to deployments upgrading, assuming they find out 
their activities are broken before they upgrade.

I understand that we do not have backward compatibility in 8.2.0 as it 
currently stands.

Can we bound the test problem by saying that all "well behaved" 
activities will continue to work?

If we can define "well behaved" and not test activities that meet that 
criteria it will save us a lot of test time.

Any other suggestions on how to bound this test challenge appreciated!

e.g. can we say that all activities not listed on this page: 
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.4 will 
work the same in 8.2.0 as they did in previous releases?

In the future if some piece of core code will cause previously supported 
activities to no longer work, I hope we can discuss and accept or reject 
that in advance (sorry if I missed that debate on this round).

In the worst case we have to test as many activities as possible but its 
much better to ensure API changes are not breaking things from the OS level.

On the other hand, newer activities can require a newer OS. That can be
handled if we have good activity documentation on the download and
activity pages.

Sounds like we have a big activity test challenge ahead for 8.2.0...

BTW is this the full list of all known activities?
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities

Let's talk more about this on the Tuesday call.

Thanks,

Greg S

Chris Ball wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>    > On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 21:06 +0200, Morgan Collett wrote:
>    >> 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.
> 
>    > Some external things have bitten us though. gtksourceview API
>    > change prevents Pippy-20 from launching (that's the version
>    > installed by Bert's script, even today)
>    > http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3488
> 
> And an Sugar API change caused Pippy to stop being able to build
> activities:
> 
>    http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7205
> 
> - Chris.