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

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 12:56 AM, Greg Smith <gregsmitholpc at gmail.com> wrote:
> I understand that we do not have backward compatibility in 8.2.0 as it
> currently stands.

For Glucose we are supposed to be backward compatible with Update.1.
ABI breaks should be reported as bugs.

> 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.

We will work on ABI policy an document it, we will hopefully find time
to introduce more automated testing.

But at the speed of change of both Glucose and the distribution, I
think it's impossible to say for sure if an activity will work without
testing it. Bugs happens.

> 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?

Do you really mean "not" there?

> 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).

For Glucose that's already the case for Update-1 -> 8.2.0. If
something broke it's a bug.

We don't have control on most of the distribution modules though, so I
guess we will have to accept occasional breaks like the gtksourceview
one.

Marco