[sugar] Activity versioning schema

[Jameson "Chema" Quinn]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 8:29 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <mikus at bga.com> wrote:

> >>>> If, as is the current plan, multiple versions of
> >>>> an activity can coexist on an XO, ...
> > Two use cases:
> > 1. I have a journal object. I want to choose which activity to open it
> with.
> > I am presented with a multilevel menu: the top level has all activities
> > which open the mime type, the next level has all major versions of those
> > activities, the next level minor versions, etc. If click without
> bothering
> > to move over to the sublevels, I get the default version from the
> sublevel
> > of my current menu, which is the starred version (if it exists) or the
> > highest version (applied recursively down the sublevels).
>
> I'm sorry, but my mind boggles at the thought of a four-year old
> clicking on a Journal entry and being presented with a palette of
> seventeen different versions of 'TamTam' -- so that he may choose
> which of those versions is appropriate for whatever upgrade the
> adults had made to that XO last week.
>
> mikus
>
>
This is not, of course, the default behavior - if you just "click on a
journal entry", it opens with whatever version created it, or the starred
version (if the creator version is not marked as creating incompatible
entries), whichever is more mature. All that logic happens with no need for
human interaction (and yes, we need Glucose to understand something about
versions for that to work).

Nevertheless, the behavior I described is my best understanding of the
approximate consensus of
several<http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Bundle_commentary>
discussions <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Commentaries/Bundles_2>(+2
more) I have had on IRC about this matter. I myself would (and did)
advocate for more automatic updating, and no decision is set in stone; but
no matter how automatic and smart we make things, we are going to have to
choose at some point between having a manual fallback, or having some things
break because we don't have a manual fallback. I'd rather have the fallback,
and I think that if we do, we should be hiding it in heirarchical menus as
much as possible (so that even if you DO need the fallback and even if you
DO have 6 installed versions of TamTam, Glucose is at every moment hiding as
many of them as possible until you deliberately, by hovering, ask it to show
you more).

If you have a better idea of how Glucose should handle these issues, please
share it. Simplifying assumptions are good, even if they're not 100% valid.
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