Customisation Stick bundles installation

[James Cameron]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 11:58:19PM +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> Will activities included in a Customisation Stick overwrite newer
> versions of the same activity on the XO, or is there a version check?

Yes they will overwrite newer versions, no there is no version check,
and the result will be very interesting, though not what you might want,
and not what the activity author intended.

Given the version numbers it would be possible to determine each
outcome and test what the result would be.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Customization_stick#Warning:_Activities_may_not_upgrade_correctly

<quote>

The customization key installs activities by unzipping them into place.
If an older version of the same activity is installed, some of the files
from the old version may remain after upgrade. This happens when some
files in the old version do not appear in the file list in the new
version. This is not always harmless. If an activity loads all files in
a directory then it can incorrectly load both old and new files.

A safe work-around is to completely remove the activity you wish to
upgrade from the XO laptop before you use the customization key. 

</quote>

The source code that does this for Fedora 11 based builds is here:
http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/dsd/dracut-modules-olpc/tree/30olpc-customization/unpack.py#n65

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/