Squeak Starter

danielv at netvision.net.il danielv at netvision.net.il
Wed Oct 16 21:21:29 UTC 2002


First of all, there's nothing personal here. Some of us would like to
have a working squeak with some support for modules someday, so let's
keep that the topic.

> Ok, what about all you other people out there? Are my explanations making any
> sense? Henrik - could you please acknowledge that I haven't made any gross
> factual errors? Daniel, what do you think?
Well, if you ask my opinion -
Your explanations make sense but that's not enough. There are two
problems here -
1. You haven't read the code. I say this once, because you said it, and
again, because you said the code is as simple as can be. See below.
2. Many of the things explained are not implemented, so the theories
given about what the semantics of various parts should be can't be
tested. In short, it's incomplete. 

The code *is* more complicated than it should be. See
Module>>localUnresolvedRefsWithScheme: bindingScheme, and various
similar methods. And no, I don't mean that just on the method level,
that's just easy to reference. 

Read the code and disagree with me, and then I'll make a real case.

When the lead maintainer (Scott) of a product (Squeak) wants to
integrate a gui fix, but he can't determine whether it is consistent
with the intention, you have a serious problem on your hands.

Anyway, this code hasn't reached production, but nobody is willing to
maintain it. I don't know how to measure whether it's failed. OTOH, when
the IDE subsystem in the Linux kernel reached a similar state, Linus
simply deleted it, and replaced it with the previous version.

Ok, you know what - let's prove it. If someone, anyone, is serious about
making 3.3a modules work, please make it so I can browse class side
methods of DeltaModules. 

This is probably a bug all of you have encountered - *that have tried to
use modules* the way they're intended. It is critical to the use of
DeltaModules.

The fix is conceptually simple, and there are at least 20 Squeakers on
this list capable of it. I dare any one of them to fix a small but
important conceptual bug in the modules system, and show me there's
hope.

In the interim, I will operate on Stephane's theory, hoping he's proven
wrong.
 
> I continue to stand by the Modules codebase as a good start, 
I think it was too ambitious, and this isn't Henrik's fault. Everyone,
me included, likes to fantasize about his favorite requirement from a
modules system, and did. So we got an incomplete shot at everything,
instead of a working something that can be improved. I think it is now a
bad start.

> but I am always
> open for improvements.
Me too, see above.
 
> regards, Göran
> 
> Göran Hultgren, goran.hultgren at bluefish.se
> GSM: +46 70 3933950, http://www.bluefish.se
> \"Department of Redundancy department.\" -- ThinkGeek

Daniel Vainsencher



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