[kepler-dev] [Bug 3898] - When switching between Kepler1.0.0 and the SVN devel tree, ~/.kepler must be removed

[bugzilla-daemon at ecoinformatics.org]

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3898





------- Comment #2 from jones at nceas.ucsb.edu  2009-03-18 12:21 -------
Although in development mode it is fine to remove .kepler either manually or
with clean-cache, there would be problems for users to regularly remove this. 
When a user selects 'Save to Library...' for an actor from the canvas, Kepler
creates a new KAR file and puts it into the cache which is then loaded into the
Library pane.  This allows users to create new actors from composites or
specialized atomics very easily.  If the .kepler directory is removed, these
would be lost, and if the cache contains the only copy of the kar (ie., if they
didn't 'Upload to repository' as well), then their actor is lost.  So, in
general, we should be creating a system in which new versions of kepler have no
need to delete the .kepler directory when upgrading.  Using the development
tree should be handled similarly.  The hard part, of course, is going backwards
(e.g., from trunk to 1.0.0), in that 1.0.0 may not be able to execute new
actors from a newer version.  It would be nice if the next version of kepler
could recognize based on actor metadata which actors it can handle, and ignore
those that it can't.  This would allow switching among different versions of
Kepler, and older versions would just ignore actors in the cache that they
can't handle.  Overall, we need a better strategy for handling .kepler.