[Box-Admins] Re: [V3dot10] <sin asunto>

[Philippe Marschall]

Marcus Denker wrote:
> 
> On 03.02.2007, at 20:02, Doug Way wrote:
> 
>>
>>
>> Well, as a starting point, there are the step-by-step instructions I
>> left on the http://source.squeakfoundation.org SqueakSource-SqF
>> project wiki tab (as you probably know).  Perhaps Bert or someone
>> knowledgeable with a more recent setup could comment on whether the
>> steps would be roughly the same for setting up a new image with the
>> latest & greatest, and which package versions would be needed, and
>> whether it would 3.7 or 3.8 or 3.9.

Do not migrate to a version of Squeak with a different Chronology
hierarchy. In general you would not want to migrate to a different
Squeak version at all.

General show stoppers for updates are class shape changes (Monticello
and Chronology).

A general update path is somewhat like this:
- take a copy of your working image
- load Monticello-avi.279
- load or merge SqueakSource-lr.1013
- see if it works (go to a project and display the details of a version)
- if it works remove all the stuff that is specific to our
implementation (incomment saving of metadata, change the google
analytics account, enable SqueakMap realeases). Even better make them
configurable.

>> I think that was set up sometime in 2005, so it is getting a bit old. 
>> Of course, I don't know if there are new features which are really
>> desperately needed or not.

There are quite a bit of improvements in all areas (speed, features,
fixes). Whether you need them desperately is a different question.

>> Being able to set more admin settings
>> through the UI would be nice.

Do you have any examples?

>> Does anyone know if the newer versions
>> are generally more stable?

Instabilities are caused by Squeak, not SqueakSource. So the answer is
no. You can try to make Seaside use IdentityKeyDictionary instead of
WeakIdentityKeyDictionary.

>> As far as whether the current setup saves its metadata in the image or
>> serialized into files, I'm 95% sure that it's in files.  (I haven't
>> looked in a long time, and for all practical purposes, Ken is the
>> current maintainer. :-) )  But I do remember seeing some type of
>> metadata files being stored in a directory, and I noted that saving
>> the image periodically seemed to be optional.

We do not store the metadata in a separate file anymore because that
takes too much time (and the Mac VM doesn't support forking). We are
unhappy with this solution but that's how it is for now.
For small installations saving metadata should be no problem. You will
have to incomment the respective methods.
In the Impara repository there is a Magma back-end. This is definitely
worth looking at.

>> Would we be able to use the same metadata files (and directory
>> structure etc) if we replaced the current squeaksource image with a
>> new up-to-date one?

Yes, as long as the shape of the repecitve classes (Monticello and
Chronology) has not changed. I would really just update the code instead
of setting up a new image.

> 
> The best would be to coordinate this a bit with Andrian and Phillippe
> (who did some work on SqueakSource), they are keeping the squeaksource.com
> setup up to date.
> 
> I had this on the todo for some time in the fall to sit together with
> Adrian and install the latest version... but we never managed to actually
> find thet time.
> 
> I've CC:ed Adrian and Phillipe.
> 
>     Marcus