[sugar] Journal Object metadata

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 2:06 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>  | On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 6:44 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
>  | <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>  |>  I ask because I am writing a trivial "Distribute" Activity, whose purpose
>  |>  is to copy journal entries from one XO to another by sharing.  This is
>  |>  working, but since the copy does not have any metadata, like MIME type, it
>  |>  cannot be opened from the Journal interface by any Activity except
>  |>  Distribute, which created it.
>  |>
>  |>  Ideally, I would like to acquire the metadata as a dbus object, so that I
>  |>  may simply shove it over a DBus Tube and then pass it on to the receiver's
>  |>  datastore.
>  |
>  | What if you serialize the whole entry (file + metadata) inside a zip
>  | file and distribute that?
>  |
>  | http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Journal_entry_bundles
>  |
>  | The journal has already support for installing to the DS these
>  | serialized entries:
>  |
>  | http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=journal-activity;a=blob;f=journalentrybundle.py
>  |
>  | Added because of http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4380 .
>
>  This sounds perfect.  In Activity code, how do a I get a
>  journal-entry-bundle from a datastore objectid, or datastore file path?

Well, the creation of the entry bundle was going to be generated by
the backup component in the school server. I don't know if Ivan got to
that part.

But serializing the metadata dict according to the spec is certainly
trivial, you can see an example in the part of the backup system that
serializes the metadata before rsync'ing to the school server:

http://tinyurl.com/2wqk9u
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/krstic/ds-backup;a=blob;f=ds_backup.py;h=a1fb11f9f6d431b0d134242f2296b743c4435d25;hb=HEAD#l53

If you decide to use this format, perhaps you could contribute this
code to the sugar toolkit? Or well, more generally, do you mind if I
steal your code when we implement entry sharing in the journal?

Thanks,

Tomeu