[Release] Monticello and ToolBuilder

Matthew Fulmer tapplek at gmail.com
Tue Oct 7 15:24:51 UTC 2008


Hi Keith. I've been trying to reach you on IRC for the past
couple of days with this issue, but I couldn't. Perhaps I should
have just sent this email to start with. Anyway...

Monticello has a kinda funky infrastructure for making its UI's.
It uses ToolBuilder when it is available, and when it is not, it
falls back to a half-clone of ToolBuilder implemented in MCTool
and MCToolBuilder.

This was made in (I believe) the Squeak 3.6 days, when
ToolBuilder was new. Now, you can hardly get an image without
ToolBuilder. 3.9, 3.10, Pharo, and Croquet all have ToolBuilder.
3.8 and Etoys do not.

I discovered this by tracing a bug with the dual repo browser in
my Etoys image. The center pane of the tool uses a ToolBuilder
"panel", which is not implemented by MCTool. So, the dual repo
browser does not work in images without ToolBuilder. I installed
the Croquet version of ToolBuilder into my Etoys image, and
everything worked fine. (I had the croquet version handy).

So, there are two ways to fix the issue with the dual repo
browser. One is to expand the emulation done by MCTool to cover
"panel". The other is to make MC depend on ToolBuilder, add
ToolBuilder to LPF, and start deleting MCTool's emulation.

I like the second option the best. ToolBuilder (especially the
existence or non-existence of UIManager) is one of the bigger
API differences between 3.8 and 3.9 images, so I think putting
ToolBuilder in LPF makes it a bit more "leveling". What do you
think?

-- 
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/


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