Features/Sugar Update Control ASLO

Summary

Modify the existing Sugar Update Control to pull from ASLO instead of the wiki.laptop.org

Owner

This should link to your home wiki page so we know who you are

• Name: David Farning

Include you email address that you can be reached should people want to contact you about helping with your feature, status is requested, or technical issues need to be resolved

• Email: <dfarning@sugarlabs.org>

Current status

• Targeted release: .86
• Last updated: 16 July 2009
• Percentage of completion: 50% All basic functionality is present. Needs testing.

Source

http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar-update-control/repos/aslo-clone

Detailed Description

Current, the Sugar Update Control pulls from wiki.laptop.org. Server side, this results in unnecessary work for activities developers as they must update specific wiki pages when releasing new activities. The existing system is rather fragile as developers must store the update information by hand in machine-readable micro-format. FWIW, this system was pretty good until ASLO came along.

Using ASLO the client can request information about updated by sending a url of the form

http://activities.sugarlabs.org/services/update.php?id=org.laptop.WebActivity&appVersion=0.82

ASLO responds by returning XML of the form

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<RDF:RDF xmlns:RDF="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:em="http://www.mozilla.org/2004/em-rdf#"><RDF:Description about="urn:mozilla:extension:org.laptop.WebActivity">
   <em:updates>
       <RDF:Seq>
           <RDF:li resource="urn:mozilla:extension:org.laptop.WebActivity:102"/>
       </RDF:Seq>
   </em:updates>
</RDF:Description>

<RDF:Description about="urn:mozilla:extension:org.laptop.WebActivity:102">
   <em:version>102</em:version>
   <em:targetApplication>
       <RDF:Description>
           <em:id>{3ca105e0-2280-4897-99a0-c277d1b733d2}</em:id>
           <em:minVersion>0.82</em:minVersion>
           <em:maxVersion>0.82</em:maxVersion>
           <em:updateLink>http://activities.sugarlabs.org/downloads/file/26063/browse-102.xo</em:updateLink>
           <em:updateInfoURL>http://activities.sugarlabs.org/versions/updateInfo/29040/%APP_LOCALE%/</em:updateInfoURL>
           <em:updateHash>sha256:d06c16a1c106dbd1a706f322d75a143d0b4e32815c22f3d95589de83e5480365</em:updateHash>
       </RDF:Description>
   </em:targetApplication>
</RDF:Description></RDF:RDF>

Benefit to Sugar

This benefits Sugar by moving the entire activities infrastructure to aslo rather than being spread across a wiki and aslo.

It reduces activity developer work load.

It reduces and isolates infrastructure load between wiki, aslo, and download system. ASLO is backed by memcache, so standard update pings are _very_ cheap. ASLO can be configured to store and serve downloads from download-farm to ease scaling issues.

Makes activities developers and infrastructure maintainers lives easier.

Scope

Technically the scope is pretty limited. Most of the changes are inside sugar-update-control or are in ASLO.

There will not be external api changes.

Depends on the bitfrost python modules. Until a decision is made concerning where to include those modules in Sugar, actinfo.py, actutils.py and urlrange.py are shipped with sugar-update-control.

Socially, this is _huge_ change. Over the last several months, ASLO has been improving and proving it's reliability. Many activities are being served via ASLO as their information is marked deprecated on wiki.laptop.org. Shifting update to point to also will require clear communication to end users and developers.

How To Test

Click on M Settings -> Software update.

Visually verify the "From Version XXX to XXX" is correct for your system.

NOTE: the updater currently reports information on all activities, not just the ones with valid updates. This is for debug purposes.

User Experience

Nothing should change from user point of view.

Dependencies

None

Contingency Plan

None necessary, revert to previous release behaviour.

Documentation

None

Release Notes

None yet

Comments and Discussion

• See discussion tab for this feature

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