[Chandler-dev] Improving the migration experience

[Brian Kirsch]

Hi Heikki,
Another aspect of the migration experience which lends well to your
suggestion of checking previous profile dirs is the chandler.prefs file.

With my next check-in, Chandler will now have a locale switching dialog
which saves the locale the user selects in the chandler.prefs.

When migrating to a new release, this information will not currently  
persist.

I can see the chandler.prefs file being leveraged more and more in  
coming
releases so the data in it either needs to be included in the export  
file or
copied / leveraged from the previous profile dir.


-Brian


On Oct 19, 2007, at 7:40 AM, Heikki Toivonen wrote:

> The manual migration really grates on me. It is an expectation in  
> modern
> day software that migration happens automatically. So what could we  
> do?
>
> I noticed that when we released 0.7.1, it was actually compatible with
> 0.7.0.1 data, so there would have been no need for migration. This
> probably won't happen often, but it is possible with short release
> cycles. I think we should change the Chandler startup such that if
> Chandler does not find a repository where it expects one to be  
> (like no
> 0.7.2 profile dir), it could check for prior profile dirs first and  
> try
> to open the latest of those. If it opened fine, great. If it raised a
> schema error, we'd need to do something else.
>
> We could also make it an option to have Chandler automatically  
> export a
> .chex file when quitting. This takes quite a bit of time, though,  
> so we
> should ask the first time the user is quitting if they would like  
> to do
> this. At that point we could tell them that this would automate
> upgrading; otherwise they would need to follow the manual migration
> instructions. Assuming the user was automatically exporting a .chex  
> file
> (in their profile dir), chandler startup code could check for the
> existence of the .chex file and load from there. If it could not find
> the .chex file, the migration dialog could have an option for the user
> to specify it manually.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> -- 
>   Heikki Toivonen
>
>
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