MANIFEST pointlessness

[Bernie Innocenti]

El Fri, 02-07-2010 a las 15:54 +1000, James Cameron escribió:

> A fascinating meaning of the word MANIFEST that I had not previously
> encountered.  That sounds like an INVENTORY.
> 
> What's the point of a file that is automatically generated?

None, this is why I removed it.

IIRC, the original plan was to make the MANIFEST contain hashes, so it
could be used for integrity checking and to update activities by
downloading only deltas.

In 3 years, nobody ever got around to implement any of these advanced
features... And in case anyone ever did, the current MANIFEST format
would have to be redesigned anyway.

To simplify the life of activity authors, we should simply remove any
mention of it from the documentation and maybe teach setup.py to
generate bundles out of git ls-files.

Meanwhile, SoaS, USR and the new ARM-based XO laptop are pressing hard
for switching from xo bundles to a full-featured packaging system, which
would also solve the problem that the MANIFEST was supposed to address.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/