Package maintenance

ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Thu Oct 9 06:28:21 UTC 2003


Hi all

I just want to share with you the problems with got when we work on KCP 
in 3.5 and move to 3.6.
Between 3.5 and 3.6 some packages have been removed and alex did a 
changeset Splitter to move the change related to class in different 
packages automatically. however the fact that we do not have a complete 
representation
of the model of code of Squeak (globals, category rename) then we edn 
up doing some stuff manually. Extremely fun to do and sure to lose 
changes and introduce bugs. We could easily imagine a system where when 
a changes is done, it is split automatically to the package where the 
concerned classes are located or to create automatically classes 
extensions to the current packages.

So if we are serious about having packages and maintaining when they 
are out of the image we should really consider
have package entity (may be package info), support inside the image for 
class extension and may be based on something else that monticello 
*categories and a complete uniform code fileout that does not contain 
doit because wehn you do code analysis you do not want to have to parse 
string and to interpret their side effect. So may be this should be the 
goal for 3.8.

By the way, I learned that joseph is now developing Ginsu for 
VisualWorks, that it is open-source (I imagine that the license 
problems are fixed after the discussions between joseph and daniel at 
ESUG) and will be distributed in Rosetta format so that people can port 
it to the dialect they want. So there would be a good match between 
Monticello (performing the
changes/team part), Ginsu offering a metamodel and SM delivering the 
packages. I guess that joseph should do a public announce soon.

If this goal would be selected as an important goal for 3.8, I would 
***really*** allocate some of my precious time on it
for example to port Ginsu and integrated it in Squeak.

Now we have to decide. Avi would you be interested to have Ginsu as a 
core meta-model for monticello?

Stef



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