On Dec 19, 2014, at 6:50 PM, David T. Lewis lewis@mail.msen.com wrote:
On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 11:06:38PM +0100, Herbert K??nig wrote:
Hi, Am 19.12.2014 um 22:18 schrieb Chris Muller: snip..
The audience I want to include into the Squeak community are not just developers but "users" too.
...snip considering myself a Squeak user I theoretically see the benefits of environments, but assume I'll rarely need them. So yes, leave them in.
+1
I don't know how much I will make use of Environments, but from everything that I have read and seen, this is a simple and intelligently designed approach to the problem. I also recall that it was enthusiastically supported by Andreas Raab, which to me is a very strong endorsement of the approach.
My sense is that Environments is 98% done. We should make every effort to ensure that the last 2% gets finished, and that the Environments system is put to some good use. By that I a mean a working example of using it in some useful way, no matter how big or how small.
Besides being helpful when using foreign libraries I too use some names only to avoid conflict with existing classes.
Practically only this week on the newbies list two people have been bitten by the fact that environments broke project save and this hasn't been fixed. I remember other people stumbling over this before and I keep using 4.4 for development and only use 4.5 for deployment because I use projects for documentation.
I think you are exactly right. And IIUC, the issues with project save are related to a short list of issues that Levente has been identifying. Sorry I don't have a link right now, but Levente has been asking for help on this for quite a while. So we need to address the "Levente list" of issues and get Squeak back to the point where project saving works properly.
From my point of view, if we could do two things I would be happy:
- Fix the "Levente list" and get project save working. I think that's
the 2% that still needs to be done for Environments.
- Use environments for something. Maybe just a hello world example to
illustrate, or maybe something related to a real project. I don't care what it is, I'd just like to have a working example that I can look at for reference.
I think I’ll be able to offer a simple example sometime in January or February. It’ll be a simple versioning system, nothing more complicated than an Array of Environments. I’ll put different versions of SQSqueakApplication (the homepage) in individual Environments and store them in an Array. This would be an elemental versioning system. Replacing SQSqueakApplication with a variable, I could switch between the versions in the Array to decide which version Altitude serves to the web.
With a control panel I could choose which one I want. With ALClient I could push source code to the server from my desktop to be compiled in different Environments. Using Altitude’s resource system, I could run all versions on different URIs to see them simultaneously in different tabs .
Environments sound grand and sweeping, but I think I think the could have simpler uses. If I get this running, I’ll post it.
Chris
Probably other people will point out that more tool support is needed, but personally I would be happy with just these two things.
Craigs approach seems plausible too but it's not yet main Squeak.
I think it is more than just plausible, it is potentially quite revolutionary. But is a different set of ideas than Environments, and I don't think that either one needs to exclude the other.
Dave
Cheers,
Herbert