[Seaside] [ANN] Seaside Installer

Pavel Krivanek squeak3 at continentalbrno.cz
Tue Aug 8 05:59:39 UTC 2006


On 8/8/06, Avi Bryant <avi.bryant at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 7, 2006, at 3:17 PM, Lukas Renggli wrote:
>
> > I created a package called "Seaside Installer" on SqueakMap. Loading
> > it will pull-in all the requirements to get a Seaside server running
> > in a fresh image. This installer could maybe later on replace the
> > official "Seaside" package on SqueakMap.
>
> So here's a challenge, related to the modularity thread on squeak-
> dev.  What's the smallest image someone can produce which can fully
> use this installer?  Possibly by bringing in some extra required
> packages as well?
>
> I've personally been more heartened by the somewhat ad-hoc shrinking
> work that Pavel, Steve Swerling, etc were doing (especially the
> series of 3.7 images like QuiteSmall.image) than by the more
> ambitious work being done at the SqF level.  In the long term, maybe
> the top-down modularize-everything work done in 3.9/3.10, and the
> bottom-up bootstrapping of Spoon will combine to give us something
> great.  In the meantime, I'd love to see a messy monolithic image
> with legacy bits, but that was as small as practically possible,
> which had roughly the same status for package releasers as
> 3.7/3.8/3.9 do: that is, when releasing something like the Seaside
> Installer, we'd try to make sure it worked on that image as well.  I
> think it's important that the compatibility work go in that direction
> rather than the other way - such images have in the past shipped with
> modified versions of MC, Seaside, etc, but that's unsustainable; as a
> package maintainer, I'd rather be making sure that my own packages
> loaded into it cleanly than worrying about someone else keeping a
> branch.
>
> If someone does release such an image - say, a 4MB 3.7-based image
> with bare-bones morphic, basic dev tools (browser/debugger/workspace/
> inspector/transcript and nothing else), and enough network and file
> support to bring in the Seaside Installer - I'll commit to trying to
> keep any packages I have a hand in loadable on it going forward. FWIW.
>
> Avi

As someone who has ported Network, Comanche, Seaside, Scriptaculous
and ShoreComponents into my GUI-less image, I can say it was not
complicated. Scriptaculous and ShoreComponents was out-of-the-box. As
far as I remember, Comanche was also not problematic - only very few
modifications.

During porting of Seaside, the most problematic was absence of image
read-writers and some small issues like direct usage of Morphic
instead of UIManager (because of backward compatibility).

I think that we should split Seaside package into two or three
packages and create something like Seaside-Loader (see
ShoreComponents) to be able to strictly detach Squeak-dependent stuff.
That will make porting to VW (and other platforms) more easy and it
will also help us to load this package into the kernel image.

I may try to load the latest versions of this packages again and
report problematic code. Maybe Michel Bany should do the same.

The next step is to port MC for the kernel image but it needs to
enforce some refactorings in the Squeak (split ChangeSorter) and so
on...

-- Pavel


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