Develop app

Jameson "Chema" Quinn jquinn at cs.oberlin.edu
Fri Mar 28 19:37:16 EDT 2008


It's getting to be time to share my work on Develop on this list. The latest
version is now up on the wiki. Below, I've pasted a copy of some relevant
text from that page. Please, try it out, and of course, all patches are
welcome.

Jameson

...copy from wiki page follows...

WARNINGS

Currently this version only edits activities that are stored in
~olpc/Activities, but that at least means that you can use it to develop
itself.

This saves modified versions of activities in the journal. In order to
continue editing these saved activity bundles, *you need to also install the
patched version of the journal called
Image:DoppelJournal-79.xo<http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:DoppelJournal-79.xo>
.*. (ticket *#6639* <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6639>) In DoppelJournal,
go to the details page for your saved application bundle, put the mouse over
the resume button in the upper right, and wait a fraction of a second until
the pulldown shows the options "Develop" and "Start". "Develop" works, but
"start" doesn't because bitfrost prevents DoppelJournal from reinstalling
the activity.

So in order to open these modified versions, you need to use your regular
journal. When you do, you run into ticket
*#6497*<http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6497>,
which means that you cannot run/test your modified activities unless you
change the version number in activity.info for each test.

Also, this app has been known to cause *TOTAL LOSS OF JOURNAL CONTENTS*. The
data is still on your XO, in /home/olpc/.sugar/default/datastore1234567890
(your numbers will be different). You can recover this data by copying it
onto an external USB and then letting the files be recognized by the
journal... (I think, I have not tried this yet. The problem is that the
files have no extension, but at least my Ubuntu system can guess the correct
file type for most.) I do not understand this bug and am not sure that it
still occurs with the latest version of Develop, but you have been warned.

This uses bundlebuilder.py to save its XO files. This means that if MANIFEST
is not correct, it can either fail to save, or fail to save all of its
files. Again, you have been warned. I have a plan to fix this, it is not too
hard.

The other known bugs are very minor issues that I already know how to fix as
soon as I get around to it. The F8 (big circle on the XO slider) key is
getting grabbed by the window manager in some cases, I have two identical
tabs of logs in some cases, and ignore-case in find is unimplemented.
 Enough bad things, what is good about it?

It really works! Not just a toy.

Rudimentary version control, using the journal.

Good find/replace support, check out the UI (though there is still room for
improvement - search history, shift-fkeys to hard-open the palettes...).
F5-F8 (the circle-slider on the XO) are set find, find prev, find next, and
{set replace or, if replace was set since find, do replace}, respectively.

Ability to view log files from within the app. Better than logviewer, since
you can see logs from previous 4 sessions, and the list is filtered to the
ones relevant to your app.
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