Hi Sarah.
Thanks for your comments.
On 05/28/09 07:02, Sarah Jelinek wrote:
> Hi Jack,
>> Hi everyone.
>>
>> In response to yesterday's meeting, here is an ordered list of
>> prioritized tasks for XML work:
>>
>> 1) Current AI manifests are not easy to use.
>>
>> Deals with Manifest inter-file organization.
>> Needs to be sorted out first.
>>
>> 2) AI's multiple parsers present unneeded complexity and
>> unmaintainability.
>>
>> Which parser. Needs to be figured out sooner rather than later.
>>
>> 3) AI manifests need to be forward and backward compatible between
>> builds.
>>
>> Compatibility needs to be built into the schema and manifest. How
>> this is done will impact other parts of AI.
>>
>> 4) Semantic validation is needed for AI
>>
>> While important, this can be done as a bolt-on check, in which case
>> it won't impact the rest of the installer code except for calling it.
>> (Note, it could also be done inside the installer code, but there are
>> issues of redundancy which make this a poor choice IMO.)
>>
>> 5) AI manifests have validation holes
>>
>> This deals more with the structure of the Sysmap Manifest (formerly
>> criteria manifest). Since this deals with a change in format which
>> will impact code only superficially from what works now, it can be
>> figured out later.
>>
>> Note: yesterday I was thinking of combining (5) with (1), but (5) is
>> very specific and deals with certain fields of one manifest, whereas
>> (1) is more general. These don't seem to fit well as a single task to
>> describe in a specification.
>>
>> Comments welcomed.
>
> Hi Jack,
>
> A question.. why do you have the forward and backward compatibility as
> #3? It seems like this one, which has a large impact on the AI
> services project, in that separating of the image from the definition
> of the service, and how we choose to resolve this versioning of
> manifests are really tied together.
I agree that compatibility is important.
That said, the input of "which parser" could also affect what can be put
into the schema to do this versioning, and can thus constrain how much
versioning can be done. This is why I put the parser ahead of
compatibility.
>
> Is it possible that #1 and #3 could be combined as they both deal with
> AI manifests and ease of use?
I would like to keep them separate as they are two separate issues.
Item (1) deals with the naming, relationships and purpose of the
different manifest files. Item (3) deals with compatibility.
Thanks,
Jack
