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

[Eben Eliason]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Kim Quirk <kim at laptop.org> wrote:
> Hmmm... I'm not sure that we have to lose all the information just becuase
> we did a clean install. If the backup of user data can be recovered
> (especially on a file by file basis). Don't we keep the meta data, so if the
> user choose to bring those items back into their laptop don't they still
> have date and time stamps, etc.?

I feel like my previous message covered most of the points you ask about.

1) As great as the backup system may be (and I hope it is!), it's
still unnecessary and suboptimal to require *anything* that was in a
child's Journal require a manual backup step to use, and especially so
because that requires access to the school server.  Consider, for
instance, a child at home who needs to look at a document from last
year to inform her completion of tonight's homework assignment.
Backups should be happening on the order of daily anyway, and entries
should fall off over time anyway; the only thing we might want to do
with the backup system is "drop off" a larger portion near the end of
the school year (say, 1/2 the capacity) to make room for "lots more
stuff" over the summer and following year.  This should still use some
heuristics (starred items, frequency of use, recency of use, etc) to
determine what should go and what should stay.

2) Like I mentioned, I don't think the current backup solution really
handles /installed/ activities, groups, friends, or settings at
present.  Perhaps we should start thinking about how it could; I'm not
sure.  All of these things should remain constant across the upgrade.
If this is what you feel as well, I have no argument. =)  I merely
point out that this is NOT a "clean install", and we shouldn't refer
to it as such.  It's a smart upgrade which retains user settings and
(at least most) data.

- Eben