Seeking advice: Version for creating plugins?

Michael Rueger m.rueger at acm.org
Mon Jul 9 18:10:19 UTC 2001


Mark Guzdial wrote:

I seem to have missed Lex's mail...

> I re-downloaded the plugins last week, and when I ran them the first
> time, they asked me: "Updates available. Download?" (or words to that
> effect), which I did.  It seems that Michael has an update mechanism
> implemented, which doesn't fix the obsolescence problem, but does fix
> the re-download problem (barring VM changes).

The update mechanism for the squeakland image is basically the same as
for the developer version. The main difference is that the user is
notified of available downloads. If you look at the page source of the
project loader page you see the parameter tag which does this trick.

> >This means people will need to download the plugin again, doesn't it?
Not the image, but the VM/plugin if need be. The user will be notified
of this as well.

> >The lurking versioning problem is serious.  When versions mix on a
> >SuperSwiki, media becomes difficult to access within months.  It seems
> >that, whenever the Squeak project decides to settle down and seriously
> >start growing a big collection of active essays, it will be necessary to
> >fix the version of Squeak they are written in.
> >
> >It is possible in principle to make multiple versions interact nicely,
> >but even there it will be much easier if the number of versions is small
> >-- e.g., Squeak 3.0, Squeak 3.2, .... :)

Versioning and externalized data is always a nightmare. My suggestion is
to create projects/media with the squeakland image, as the newer
versions of Squeak usually are backward compatible. I'm also thinking
about putting version information into projects so the user can be
warned if he is on an older version.

Michael




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