Squeak-dev March 2009

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

134 participants
173 discussions

Re: Newbie Questions
by Keith Hodges 25 Mar '09

25 Mar '09

Cross posted because I think others may find this discussion useful: Chris Muller wrote: > Hi Keith, I think the work you did on Level-Playing Field and MC 1.5 > has always sounded fantastic. > >> implemented it. Magma users use a variety of images and Magma needs you >> to have MCConfigurations working. Thats what LevelPlayingField in LPF >> gives you. >> > > So if it makes MC Configurations "work" why do *I* need to use it and > not just those wanting to load Magma via MC Configurations? > > You dont, but I kind of assume that you are a user too. >> Also the issue of extensions to classes that don't exist in older images >> is solved via the orphanage. MC1.5 doesnt complain like MC1 does. >> > > This is again something that happens for those *loading* Magma, so is > there a reason it is needed by the person doing the deployment? And, > if so, and I do, will others who want to load it require MC 1.5 and/or > LPF? > > The reason I have not moved on it after all this time, and I'm almost > ashamed to say it, it has never bubbled up into the realm of > critical-need that exceeded other priorities. Is LPF and MC 1.5 "drop > in and go?", completely compatible with existing mc packages? > > Thanks.. > Chris > It should be more so. The original MC1 made no effort to make anything compatible with anything else. It uses a simple binary storeOn: so save its binary data. This means that if you add an instance variable to any class in MC1's model, your packages are incompatible with past MC1's This is what happened, the MC in 3.9 added support for traits, and so packages saved, with that MC are incompatible with previous MC's. MC1.5 knows about this, and if a model class is realised with have extra data items, that it does not have inst vars for, it pops them into a properties dictionary. Also, MC1.5 makes an effort to only save the minimum amounts of instVars, so if your class does not have any Traits it saves, only the non-trait oriented inst-vars, and in doing so in theory the packages it generates should be compatible with even the older non 3.9 MC's. The original MC1 was very naive about handling errors. It would simply retry anything that raised an error. There were a number of situations that it did not handle well, such as renaming or re-ordering of inst vars. MC1.5 takes a much more considered approach. It attempts to actually make the class definition compatible with both the before and after situations, when loading methods. Obviously this is not always possible. In theory MC1.5 should handle more of the difficult cases, than MC1.0 did. However that doesn't stop people blaming MC1.5 if a package doesnt load, and they may find that the old MC1.0 can handle it using its old brute force approach. Finally MC1.6 with atomic loading is really cool, its over 3 times faster, which for something the size of Magma is a big deal. (However last time I tried it there was a minor bug) thanks for asking the relevant questions. Keith

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Re: ProcessWrapperPlugin.dll [was: OSProcess capabilities on Windows]
by Aran Lunzer 25 Mar '09

25 Mar '09

Andreas wrote: >Aran Lunzer wrote: >> Looking at the source code for the DLL, I'm afraid that at the level of my >> non-Squeak skills it would probably take me a day to rebuild it. Do you >> happen to have a 3.7-specific compiled DLL? > >It is extremely unlikely that the problem is with the DLL. More likely >you are switching between VMs that are not compatible with this version. >Try running your 3.7 images with a more recent VM and see if this works >with the DLL in question. Back in my original message about OSProcess I mentioned that I'm working with a 3.7 Web-browser-plugin VM that has been customised (to do various things in support of the .NET bridge). If I can't persuade ProcessWrapper to work with that, I can't use it. At least, not this year :-) I did a little more testing and, as you suggested, the more recent VM helped: the out-of-the-box 3.8 release (6665), for example, couldn't load the ProcessWrapper DLL with its standard VM (Nov 2003), but could when I wheeled in the VM from 3.9. So it seems that something has changed in the VMs, and that something in the DLL only works with new ones. But given that Balasz said that they had used ProcessWrapper with 3.7, I wondered whether they had - or could recompile - a version of the DLL that would be compatible with an old VM. What has changed in the VM wrt DLL loading? Something to do with 64/32-bit support, perhaps? All the best - Aran

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Re: ProcessWrapperPlugin.dll [was: OSProcess capabilities on Windows]
by Aran Lunzer 25 Mar '09

25 Mar '09

Andreas Raab wrote: > Aran Lunzer wrote: >> So it seems that something has changed in the VMs, and that something in >> the DLL only works with new ones. But given that Balasz said that they >> had used ProcessWrapper with 3.7, I wondered whether they had - or could >> recompile - a version of the DLL that would be compatible with an old >> VM. >> >> What has changed in the VM wrt DLL loading? Something to do with >> 64/32-bit support, perhaps? > > I don't recall. But you should be able to recompile the plugin for the > version you need it to work with unless it uses any of the newer > features. There are two ways to do that: > > a) Grab the source for the original 3.7 build, put the plugin into the > proper place and build it against the 3.7 sources. > > b) Use your current build environment and #define VM_PROXY_MINOR to be > the minimum version you can get away with (i.e., the minimum version the > plugin compiles with). Wow! Approach (b) did the trick! I only needed to increment by 1. Sneaky but effective :-) Many thanks - Aran

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Agenda for Board meeting March 26th 2009
by Andreas Raab 25 Mar '09

25 Mar '09

Folks - The agenda for our next board meeting is available at http://squeakboard.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/agenda-for-march-26th-2009/ If you have issues you'd like to put on the list (either for now or later) please bring them up here or as a follow-up on the above post. Cheers, - Andreas

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Re: How to get a list of all plugins in VM (Andreas Raab)
by Maarten Maartensz 24 Mar '09

24 Mar '09

Hello Andreas, Long time, no see but I still follow Squeak and my Squeak Help on my site. See http://www.maartensz.org/computing/computingFrame.htm which I wrote for Squeak 3.7 is still used daily on my site by quite a few visitors, so apparently it still satisfies a need. My main reason to keep following Squeak is interest (it looks a lot better now than a few years ago) in HLL, Smalltalk and Morphic, but my own main interest in computing and programming these days is mostly in assembly. And this caused my answering this thread, though it doesn't answer Ross Boylan's question for Linux, which I don't run. You wrote, in reply to him: > Ross Boylan wrote: > > I'm trying to figure out if I'm setup so I can use some of the font > > packages. I'm running a 3.10 image (but 3.9 VM) on Linux (Debian > > Lenny). > > > > How do I get a list of all plugins? > > You don't. External, unloaded plugins can't be enumerated since they are > just platform shared libraries (DLLs). They could be found anywhere in > your search path which makes it very difficult to list them explicitly. On Windows, though, there are nifty great and small assembly-related programs that answer many queries, also about what is really there in Squeak.exe, all laid out neatly. A great one for this (also in size and capacities) is OllyDbg, by Oleg Yushuck; a small one (idem) is PEView by Wayne Radburn. Both are at various places on the internet, and easily found with Google. The last one is most convenient here. The one I used is 0.9.8.0 that takes - unzipped - all of 67 Kb (it's programmed in assembly, you see, and there is no image at all...) which neatly shows in its SECTION.edata (e.g. EXPORT Address Table) which primitives are in the executable. Likewise, its SECTION.idata displays the loaded DLLs. To find this and much more, all one needs is PEView and opening Squeak.exe in it, which then lists it quite neatly. If one knows some C or Assembly this is all quite revealing and interesting, and one item to be found thus at various places is e.g. "Andreas Raab", at least in the version of Squeak.exe I inspected this way. In any case... some questions about Squeak.exe can definitely be answered quite easily and fastly on Windows using PEView. Regards, Maarten. > 13. Re: How to get a list of all plugins in VM (Andreas Raab) > Message: 13 > Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:55:29 -0700 > From: Andreas Raab <andreas.raab(a)gmx.de> > Subject: [squeak-dev] Re: How to get a list of all plugins in VM > To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list > <squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org> > Cc: ross(a)biostat.ucsf.edu > Message-ID: <49C81361.7040308(a)gmx.de> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > Ross Boylan wrote: > > I'm trying to figure out if I'm setup so I can use some of the font > > packages. I'm running a 3.10 image (but 3.9 VM) on Linux (Debian > > Lenny). > > > > How do I get a list of all plugins? > > You don't. External, unloaded plugins can't be enumerated since they are > just platform shared libraries (DLLs). They could be found anywhere in > your search path which makes it very difficult to list them explicitly. > > The right way to solve your problem is to provide an entry point in your > plugin that can be used to detect whether the plugin is available. A > useful thing to do here is to provide a primitiveVersion because later > on you'll be able to use that to detect whether the user has an outdated > plugin version. Then you can simply implement something like: > > MyClass>>pluginVersion > "Returns the plugin version, or nil if the plugin cannot be loaded" > <primitive: 'primitiveVersion' module: 'MyPlugin'> > ^nil "indicates failure" > > MyClass>>isPluginPresent > "Returns true if the plugin is present" > ^self pluginVersion notNil > > MyClass>>isPluginOfTheRightVersion > "Returns true if the plugin is of the right version" > ^(self pluginVersion ifNil:[0]) > self minimumVersion > > Cheers, > - Andreas > > > ------------------------------

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Kernel fixes
by Andreas Raab 24 Mar '09

24 Mar '09

Folks - While fixing Semaphore>>waitTimeoutMSecs: in our internal images, I noticed that 3.10 was still missing a number of important Kernel fixes that we've long taken for granted. If you run servers or rely otherwise on heavy process/delay/semaphore usage you will definitely want to apply the fixes provided at http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7321 To install, either download the patches or just execute: Installer mantis fixBug: 7321. Do note that these fixes apply only to 3.10 since they assume other changes to be present (so they won't work against 3.9 for example). Also, they depend on each other so unless you are really careful you should not pick and choose (this is why they are filed as a single bug). Cheers, - Andreas

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Re: [squeak-dev] Squeak packages for accessing SQL databases and for
by Davide Grandi 24 Mar '09

24 Mar '09

> ========================== > Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 10:48:15 +0000 > From: Frank Church <vfclists(a)googlemail.com> > To: squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org > Subject: [squeak-dev] Squeak packages for accessing SQL databases > and for report generation > ========================== > > Which are the main packages for accessing SQL databases and business > applications in general, like reports, printing, forms generation > etc? > > Frank > Few links for data base access (from my bookmarks ...) Odbc for squeak : http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2480 ODBCEnh : http://map.squeak.org/package/bbbace86-725b-4127-b4f2-7b71e08da278 Squeak PostgreSQL : http://www.io.com/~jimm/projects/squeak_postgresql/ PostgreSQL Client for Squeak : http://ca.geocities.com/zazu%40rogers.com/pgsqueak/ TamODBC : http://map.squeak.org/package/987981d0-e89f-4370-ab6f-b764d067ea9d Best regards, Davide Grandi -- Ing. Davide Grandi davide.grandi(a)mclink.it

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[Ann] System-PasswordManager
by Keith Hodges 24 Mar '09

24 Mar '09

I have published MCPasswordManager as a separate package http://www.squeaksource.com/mc/System-PasswordManager Keith

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How to get a list of all plugins in VM
by Ross Boylan 24 Mar '09

24 Mar '09

How do I find out what plugins my current VM was built with? This is about an already built VM, not VMMaker. The closest I have found is SmalltalkImage current listBuiltinModules and listLoadedModules. I believe that external, unloaded modules will not appear in either. I'm trying to figure out if I'm setup so I can use some of the font packages. I'm running a 3.10 image (but 3.9 VM) on Linux (Debian Lenny). How do I get a list of all plugins?

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seaside & pier on the iPhone
by John M McIntosh 24 Mar '09

24 Mar '09

For a couple of months now I have been working on a seaside/pier based Wiki for the iPhone. I am now about a week away from sending it off to the Apple app store. However I'd like to broaden the beta test group a bit so I can catch any issues before I submit it, especially in the area of persistency storage. So what's it good for? I was asked that question this week, but let me turn it around and ask: Good question what is Seaside and Pier good for? An iPhone Wiki? Well... It's a handy construct for consolidating a bunch of PDF documents since the mobile Safari Browser does a fine job of rendering them on the device and a WIki does a fine job of providing a navigation framework, but I'm sure there are other more important answers out there somewhere? So Anyone who would like to participate as a beta tester can send me email with a description of what they would use the Wiki for, and supply their iPhone or iPod touch's device identifier and I'll look into sending them a copy of the app. -- = = = ======================================================================== John M. McIntosh <johnmci(a)smalltalkconsulting.com> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com = = = ========================================================================

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