Hi Elliot, You brought up an interesting issue. I really hope you won't mind me opening up the discussion to sugar ml.
Elliot Fairweather wrote: > Mapping OLPC activity names (which take the form of well-known DBus > bus names) to a two byte activity type in Cerebro is problematic (as > well as creating a rather small upper bound for the number of possible > activity types.) Maybe the activity type could be a given as a string > or a longer byte array, maybe up to the maximum DBus bus name length > (256 bytes?)? A valid argument. I remember discussing the idea behind this in the past with Michael, but I'm not sure if Sugar landed a decision on this. The activity type is supposed group different activities into a single type based on their capabilities and represent this group with a two-byte field. For example, I wrote an activity that does chat, file sharing and a bidding game. I _believe_ the activity should advertise its capabilities as 'xx' for chat, '\x00\x01' for file-sharing and '99' for the bidding game. The bytes chosen are clearly random, but the idea is that my activity would be able to engage in a chat session with a regular chat activity under the same activity type, or with previous version of itself lacking the file-sharing capability. Maybe this is simply an overkill. At any rate, I will add (I filed a ticket) a sufficiently large (255 chars?) name field for activities, although I would much prefer designing this mechanism properly (any suggestions by Sugar(ed) developers?). > Something else I forgot in my earlier mail, is that it would be really > helpful if up-to-date documentation for the API was available. The > page to which I have been referring > (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Cerebro) differs in quite a few places from > what d-feet tells me is there in reality :) Right again. This may take some time though as I'm currently plagued by a thesis deadline :( > > Thanks again, > Elliot Pol -- Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos Graduate student Viral Communications MIT Media Lab Tel: +1 (617) 459-6058 http://www.mit.edu/~ypod/ _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar