Squeak-dev August 2007

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

132 participants
163 discussions

Submitting a fix
by Jerome Peace 06 Aug '07

06 Aug '07

Submitting a fix. Hi Bryce, If you have put it on Mantis that is the right thing. I usually also use the mantis>send a reminder feature to send a report to Edgar(edgardec) when I think things are ready. It is also good to separate the fix and the test into separate pieces. That would allow the loading of the test before the patch to verify that it fails before/ passes after. If its a new report, then asking the squeak-dev list to look at it and comment as you have implicitly done here is good also. Submitting fixes/harvestling fixes is more an art than a science. The procedure changes with every release team and often changes during the release teams efforts. The authoritave people to say what the harvesting procedure is right now would be Edgar and Ralph for 3dot10. For 3dot11 it will depend on the release team. I suspect that a good way to track fixes for a release would be to set up a mantis parent report and relate all the ready to go fixes to the parent report. Hypertext is the bees knees and mantis does it well. Hth, Yours in service and curiosity, --Jerome Peace *** >bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk >Mon Aug 6 10:10:43 UTC 2007 > > >I've packaged up a minor fix to printing Arrays containing >metaclasses. What is the appropriate way to submit this to be included >in the next release? There's even a test covering the bug. > >The Mantis bug is: >http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=6590 > >The bug matters to me because I print arrays into error logs then want >to evaluate them back into Squeak to replay the logs to reproduce >bugs. > >Bryce *** ____________________________________________________________________________________ Take the Internet to Go: Yahoo!Go puts the Internet in your pocket: mail, news, photos & more. http://mobile.yahoo.com/go?refer=1GNXIC

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Translating Game tutorial (for Steve Wessels)
by Giuseppe Luigi Punzi Ruiz 05 Aug '07

05 Aug '07

Hi, This message is for Steve Wessels. I wrote you about how to get a zip with all the game tutorial content to translate to spanish, under your name, and I didnt' get any answer. I would like to get it, and port to PDF too, but, I want your permission. Cheers.

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News Team Report - July 2007
by Ron Teitelbaum 05 Aug '07

05 Aug '07

Hi All, Well another month has come and gone and we posted a total of 4 articles. That's pretty bad. There is just not enough time. We could use some volunteers!! Here are the top 5 posts for July. More eye-candy coming soon to your Squea <http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2007/07/15/more-eye-candy-coming-soon-to- your-squeak-desktop/> 2,949 A Squeak 3.9 development tutorial <http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2007/07/15/a-squeak-39-development-tutori al/> 620 New Seaside website <http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2007/07/15/new-seaside-website/> 315 OLPC - The $100 Laptop - Goes into Produ <http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/olpc-the-100-laptop-goes-into- production/> 245 Supporting Seaside, OR Mapping vs. OODBM <http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2007/06/28/supporting-seaside-or-mapping- vs-oodbms/> 232 (article from June total 684) By the way does anyone really read these reports? Are they useful? Thanks, Ron Teitelbaum Squeak News Team Leader

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A smile don't hurt
by Edgar J. De Cleene 05 Aug '07

05 Aug '07

http://wiki.arklinux.org/index.php/Microsoft_Trek People which don't like Star Trek parodies don't read. Found on research about unusual linuxes which could run on CD without install. By the way arklinux works on handicapped hardware, but still don't recon my old serial mouse Edgar

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which files to add to a Windows Squeak to make it run on Mac? Linux?
by Herbert König 05 Aug '07

05 Aug '07

Hello, I have a usb stick with a Squeak windows installation. Now I want to make this run on a mac and Linux. From my windows point of view I would have to copy the Mac or Linux equivalent of squeak.exe. While the Win VM download is half a MB the Mac VM download is 13 MB bringing an image and loads of files in deeply nested folders. Is there a way to copy one file (or whatever is the minimum set of files)into my Win installation and create a link (or batch?) which starts the Mac VM with my "3_6_basic_projektleitung.image" Same for Linux, the VM download installs about 4 MB in multiple folders. I want to plug in the stick in any machine and the three topmost items should be: 0Linux 0Mac and 0Windows of which I would choose the right type of OS. Thanks, Herbert mailto:herbertkoenig@gmx.net

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Recovering code from changeset ?
by Damien Pollet 04 Aug '07

04 Aug '07

Here's what just happened to me: I cloned my base image (pre-configured squeak-dev), created a category and started coding. In particular I renamed a class I had just created. After a while my image locked up (*), so I killed Squeak and tried to recover my code from the last snapshot and the changes. Problem: the .changes don't know anything about that class rename. I see chunks adding methods to the class with the old name, and other chunks adding to the new name, but no rename nor remove-and-recreate-the-whole-class chunks. In the end I loaded the first changes, then renamed the class, then loaded the rest. I also had to touch and recompile a few methods because no instance variables were there. Bug? How are we supposed to recover code and be reasonably confident that it's complete and coherent? (*) just for fun, inspect this in a sacrificiable image: (ImageReadWriter formFromFileNamed: anExistingPngFileName) colorAt: aPointWithinTheBounds and edit the value of alpha then accept... -- Damien Pollet type less, do more [ | ] http://typo.cdlm.fasmz.org

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[SqueakSource] SSFilesystem woes
by Andreas Raab 03 Aug '07

03 Aug '07

Hi - [I couldn't find a mailing list dedicated to SqueakSource discussions so I'm abusing Squeak-dev here. If there is one, please point me to it] We've been using SqueakSource at Qwaq for our internal projects and unfortunately it works only so-so. Mostly it works but every other day it basically spins out at 100% CPU and needs to be killed for good. Since this usually looses the last checkin(s) it's a major annoyance which we work around by sending an email message which includes a portion of the log so that at least you have a chance to see if it was "your" checkin that was just lost. That was until two days ago. About a week or so ago, we ran out of disk space on the box and after restoring it the server was working quite well until it again spun out in 100%. After the restart we noticed that we hadn't lost just one but several dozen checkins - basically everything that happened after we run out of disk space didn't show up. Since this smelled like major desaster I actually dug into the SqueakSource code to see what can be done to restore our data (fortunately, I could see that all of the data was actually on the server). This immediately showed a couple of major issues: 1) When SSFilesystem saves a repository it uses a mutex to serialize access but it doesn't protect a client from modifying the repository *while* it is saving. Since this is a process running in background priority, two saves in quick succession will lead to the second save modifying the repository that the first one is trying to write on disk. And indeed, looking at our problems, many of them show a pattern of two commits closely together like here: 2007-07-10T21:09:57+00:00 PUT /Qwaq/QwaqForums-1.0.42.mcm (qwaq) 2007-07-10T21:09:57+00:00 MODIFIED by SSSession>>putRequest: 2007-07-10T21:09:57+00:00 BEGIN SAVING 2007-07-10T21:11:03+00:00 PUT /Qwaq/QwaqForums-1.0.41.mcm (qwaq) 2007-07-10T21:11:03+00:00 MODIFIED by SSSession>>putRequest: (note that the "END SAVING" is missing before the second put) So it seems like one of the failure modes is that the repository is being modified *while* it is being saved. In addition, I think that one of the reasons while so many of the saved snapshots are "kaputt" is simply that they are broken by the same concurrent modification. I'd appreciate some insight from the authors (or anyone else knowledgeable) what the right fix for this problem might be. I have no idea how Seaside in general deals with these concurrency issues but it seems pretty clear that SSFilesystem is *not* safe in the face of concurrent modifications of the repository. 2) Much to my surprise I found that SSFilesystem actually *has* code that can be used to recover versions if any of the above happens (SSFilesystem>>importVersionsFor:) but it seems to be pretty much unused and affected by some bit rot. One of the things I did for our version is to hook this code up with the case that the last snapshot is kaputt, so that if there is a broken snapshot SSFilesystem automatically imports all the versions that aren't currently present in the repository. I'm attaching the recovery code in case anyone else has had similar problems. Question: Does anyone use similar/other changes like those? If so I'd be interested in learning about them. 3) The speed (and snapshot size) of SSFilesystem is pretty abysmal (on our box a repository snapshot is about 4mins and about 4MB each). Looking at what it's writing it seems that most of it is information that is easily available from the .MCZs and really doesn't need to be kept in the snapshot. Question: Is anyone using alternative storage mechanisms (lightweight & fast perhaps)? If so, what do you use and how does it work out? Generally speaking, what *do* people use for Squeaksource storage given that SSFilesystem is generally quite unreliable? I'd appreciate any help on the above issues. Cheers, - Andreas

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License change process
by Pavel Krivanek 03 Aug '07

03 Aug '07

Hi all, small notes to the relicensing effort. Please see http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-July/119133.html. As you maybe know, the main idea is to have relatively small image that contains only free code and that is able to load the rest of current Squeak. I have selected about 3000 methods that can do this job and started with the license change of the code: 1) code from all the people that signed the license agreement is free 2) some methods with non-standard initials were fixed (initialsFix.st) to generate valid table of authors 3) this initials are considered to be free: ab jm sma fbs BP MD md sd NouryBouraqadi stephaneducassse tpr. That are mostly initials of known authors in a different form. 4) I compared the code with the code of free Squeak 1.1 and if the code was the same and had no author, I added this comment: "from Squeak 1.1". Such methods have new initials (pk). 5) if the method has the same code as in Squeak 1.1 but initials of a contributor that haven't signed the agreement, it includes comment like: "from Squeak 1.1, reformated by Andrew C. Greenberg". The new initials are mine again. 6) The most problematic is the rest of non-free code. You may find the list of this methods here: http://comtalk.net/public/pub/KernelImage/license/ (odf table, pdf) It's 316 methods. Some of them are simple accessors and are very easy to rewrite - there's the special column with this information. The next column contains original free code from Squeak 1.1 (if any). It is always somehow different from the current version. I have created next column with comment information that says how the original method should be changed. For example it says that the ZeroDivide class should be used instead of general error etc.. Of course some methods aren't easy to rewrite (comments like significant changes or different code). So I'm looking for a good soul that wants to help and will write this accessors and will modify the original methods where the information enable it. This person must not see current versions of this methods! That's why I cannot do that by myself. Then we will have got about 200 kernel methods to rewrite. We need to build two teams for that task: - one group of people will read the current code and will write tests that will specify the functionality of the methods (plus maybe some useful comments or hints) - the second group will write the new implementation. The members of this group must not see the current implementation. As the bonus to the free kernel we will have got more tests. I think that this is the best way how to correctly change the license of non-free Squeak code. If you have better idea, tell me. So, volunteers? ;-) Chees, -- Pavel

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Whisker browser / Certification on squeak people?
by Simon Guest 03 Aug '07

03 Aug '07

Hi, I'm just recently getting into Squeak more seriously, having been dabbling for a while. I'm a maths teacher, currently using Squeak as a demonstration tool in the classroom, and generally enjoying messing around with it. (I used to develop software for a living, in other languages.) Anyway, having just discovered the Whisker browser, I've now been saved from death by 1000 windows. Thank you, Doug! I'd like to register my interest in Whisker on Squeak People, for which I seem to need to be certified as an Apprentice. So, if anyone recognises me from my few previous posts here - mostly questions, and a contributed bugfix or two on Mantis, I'd be grateful for a certification on Squeak People, where I'm known as sjg. cheers, Simon

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Fwd: cfp: New review of Hypermedia and Multimedia
by rfh＠atnet.at 03 Aug '07

03 Aug '07

could this be of interest for some of you, gurus? cheers, reinhard ----- Weitergeleitete Nachricht von "Tudhope D S (AT)" <dstudhope(a)GLAM.AC.UK> ----- Datum: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 15:18:00 +0100 Von: "Tudhope D S (AT)" <dstudhope(a)GLAM.AC.UK> Antwort an: Interoperability issues across domains <INTEROPERABILITY(a)JISCMAIL.AC.UK> Betreff: cfp: New review of Hypermedia and Multimedia An: INTEROPERABILITY(a)JISCMAIL.AC.UK Call for Papers New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia Editor: Doug Tudhope (dstudhope(a)glam.ac.uk) Associate Editor: Daniel Cunliffe (djcunlif(a)glam.ac.uk) Faculty of Advanced Technology, University of Glamorgan, UK Submission deadline: January 16, 2008 Acceptance notification: February 27, 2008 Final manuscripts due: April 9, 2008 NRHM covers hypermedia, hypertext, interactive multimedia and related technologies. We invite papers on the following topics and related issues: - Conceptual basis of hypertext systems cognitive aspects design strategies - Intelligent and adaptive hypermedia knowledge representation knowledge organisation systems and services the semantic web - Multimedia issues time and synchronisation; link dynamics audio/image/video processing and compression content-based retrieval - Interaction navigation and browsing; search systems; studies of information seeking and navigation behaviour; testing and evaluation user interfaces; multi-modal interaction - Tools for hypermedia (automatic) authoring systems - Applications in business, commerce, digital libraries, e-learning, information management, the professions, publishing, and public administration, etc. The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (NRHM) is published by Taylor & Francis and appears in both print and digital formats. For more details and indicative topics, see the journal website: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13614568.asp Submissions may take the form of research papers or shorter technical notes and should be sent by email to the editors, preferably in pdf format. Questions and enquiries are welcome. ----- Ende der weitergeleiteten Nachricht -----

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