Sharing behavior in the core Read activity

[Gary C Martin]

Hi James,

> Another thing I remember reading is that if two kids share an activity
> and one has an older version of the activity than the other, the older
> version gets updated so they both have the newer version.  This  
> doesn't
> seem to be happening.  I have two test machines, one running xubuntu
> with the sugar RPMs and another running Suse with sugar-jhbuild.  I  
> was
> hoping to use this alleged ability of Sugar to update activities in my
> testing, so I can develop on the xubuntu machine and test on both
> without passing USB drives back and forth.  If someone could improve  
> my
> understanding of this I'd be grateful.

Yea, I'm not aware that this is implemented, just good intentions at  
this stage (such a great idea and only really possible on an open  
platform like the XO). Even worse though, as a new activity developer,  
the first thing I wanted to try once I got my new activity working  
nicely, was to share it and get some quick feedback – I soon  
discovered you can only see a shared activity if you already have it  
installed. So you can only really practically share the blessed  
selection of activities that you can assume another XO might already  
have installed, no 'viral' activity distribution model yet. Those kids  
better have access to an upto-date server, the internet, or spring  
some $$ for USB keys and start sneaker netting.

The more I try to dig about in the code, and get involved where I can,  
the more I realise there is just _so_ much work required and massively  
too few developers to get the lower layers stable and robust for the  
target environments. From what I can tell, there's a very small group  
(in the single digit figures) of folks coding their socks off and  
trying to dealing with upstream politics. They've got an amazing  
amount done, all things considered.

Just hope we can all hang in there, and contribute where ever we can,  
it's quite a bumpy ride.

Gary