On Tuesday, 18 June 2013 at 16:33, Travis Choma wrote:

> Mounir, this sounds reasonable to me. Google also had to version their 
> manifest file to deal with changes they introduced in v2 but still wanted v1 
> manifests to work properly and retain their original syntax and semantics.
>  

This could solve problems going forward, but current generation of devices 
would still be affected as they would just ignore "manifest_version" (i.e., 
they remain version agnostic - hence icon remains a problem).  

As I understand it "manifest_version" literally means "process this manifest 
with this particular code path". We have to be careful that this doesn't get 
crazy, because if we start changing stuff and we want to support legacy 
content, then we need to make sure everything for each manifest_version 
continues to work without regressions. It also ties the manifest to a 
versioning system, which means we would need rules about what constitutes a 
version change and what happens if version 3 or 4 stuff appears in the manifest 
marked as 2 (ignore it? use it?).  

Google can get away with using this scheme because their apps can only be 
installed form their store (and not the open Web) - hence, they can remove apps 
with outdated manifests from their store when they feel like it. In our case, 
we have to be more mindful because users are not restricted from where they 
install hosted apps from (and we have no way of forcing developers to update 
outdated manifests on the open Web).  

Just some thoughts…  

--  
Marcos Caceres



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