[etoys-dev] Preparing for Monticello-based updates

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 21.04.2010, at 05:17, David T. Lewis wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 04:52:02PM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
>> On 4/20/2010 4:35 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>> We still need to refine the categorization. I had a crazy idea: in the
>>> trunk image, generate a list of which class is in which category, same for
>>> all methods. Then recategorize everything in the Etoys image to match that
>>> (provided the class/method exists). Since this only recategorizes, it
>>> should do no harm. Could that possibly work?
>> 
>> Yes. I was thinking about the same thing.
> 
> Yes it should work. The only caution is that when you recategorize
> a class, it ends up looking like a big batch of deletions from one
> package, and a batch of additions to some other package. This will
> look rather alarming to someone accustomed to tidy change set updates,
> so it will be good get these changes done as soon as possible.

That is exactly why I want the recategorization done *before* creating the actual packages :)

>>> I have been playing with the idea to keep a traditional update stream in
>>> place as fall-back ... in case some surgery is needed that would be
>>> infeasible with MC updates.
>> 
>> I think that's wise, in particular in the early stages. In fact, you
>> might consider using the update stream until the dust settles and post
>> updated MC packages after installing each update. This could be
>> automated and while you're trying to catch up all you'd need to do is to
>> load updates first, then merge MC packages and the diffs should be
>> empty, no?
> 
> And even if it cannot be automated, it is still quite easy to manually
> apply the MC updates after change sets are committed. Use the preamble
> of the change set as the update comment for the MC update(s), so all
> of the comments will be aligned and there is a way to trace the MC
> package updates back to the change sets. Typically a single change
> set will require updates to more the one MC package, so just paste
> the same change set preamble text into each of the affected MC package
> commits. It's not perfect, but it's good enough to get started.
> 
> Dave

Well if it can't be automated it's cumbersome. I want to make contributing as simple as possible. Manually maintaining the changeset update stream should be left to emergency surgery only, IMHO.

- Bert -