Update stream ideas for 3.8 (was Re: Squeak 3.8 status)

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Wed Aug 11 07:08:22 UTC 2004


On Aug 10, 2004, at 10:10 PM, Doug Way wrote:

> Now, having read the rest of this thread and thinking about it a bit 
> more, I'm not totally convinced that the separate update stream is 
> absolutely necessary, even if we do #2 and #3.  If we enforce (via the 
> broadcast mechanism) that the ConflictChecker is run, and especially 
> if SUnit tests must pass, before an update can be broadcasted, we 
> could arguably avoid "major" bugs from occurring in a single update 
> stream.  I think SUnit tests take a minute or two to run right now... 
> that's probably reasonable overhead when broadcasting an update.  (And 
> if several updates are broadcasted at once, SUnit tests still only 
> need to be run once for all of them.)

But that's no fun.  There seems to be a lot of talk about what might 
and might not work, when we could just be trying it out.  What's to 
lose?  Say we build an "unstable" stream that ends up being a complete 
mess - the only people that are affected are those that were tracking 
that stream, and they can't have been expecting much anyway.

I suggest we try The Simplest Possible Thing, which is probably this: 
set up an alternate update stream, publish a code snippet that lets 
anyone point their image to it, and hand out the upload password to 
everyone with Master certification on SqP.  Then step back and see what 
happens.  My guess is that, like wikis, the system will be more robust 
than you give it credit for: if someone publishes a bad update, someone 
else will quickly remove it, and life will go on.

Avi




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