Features/Host Version

Summary

Using "hosts" variable in the activity.info files to determine whether an activity runs on the specific Sugar installation.

Owner

Name: Christoph Derndorfer
Email: christoph AT olpcnews DOT com

Current status

Targeted release: 0.86
Last updated: 2009-07-21
Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description

With 0.86 being on the horizont, 0.84 being used on SoaS, 0.82 being widely used among the G1G1 community and some deployments and many deployment still using pre-0.82 software I think the issue of activity compatibility deserves some serious attention. Otherwise this has the potential to create _a lot of_ confusion and frustration further down the road.

Not sure what the original plans wrt the technical implemention of this feature were but I would assume the harder part of solving this problem is spreading the word among activity developers to update their .xo bundles accordingly.

Someone, preferably the activity authors themselves, would need to check activities against the various Sugar versions which are in use and document their findings. This however could also be a nice entry-level task for people who want to start contributing to Sugar.

Benefit to Sugar

What is the benefit to the platform? If this is a major capability update, what has changed? If this is a new feature, what capabilities does it bring? Why will Sugar become a better platform or project because of this feature?

Scope

TBD

How To Test

TBD

User Experience

Depends on the implementation but one way could be to fail gracefully by showing a warning when an activity that doesn't work on the specific Sugar version is downloaded/run. The warning message could also include information or a link to information on how to update the XO to the latest version.

Dependencies

TBD

Contingency Plan

None yet

Documentation