Boosting Squeak: RockSolid images article

hjh-sqlist hjh-sqlist at lexdb.net
Thu Dec 30 17:25:52 UTC 2004


Quoting Giovanni Giorgi <giovanni.giorgi at siforge.org>:

> Hi all, I have posted an article on SquekPeople:
>   I have read the "rant" and "unrant" subject with a mix of uneasiness 
> (embarrassment) and fear. The "Rant" thread began on the 15th of 
> december 2004, and produced a lot of discussion. I will not summarize 
> the thread, because a lot of people read it. Instead, I will go forward 
> and try to find a pragmatic and constructive of helping the community 
> (and yes, I am also very bold and handosome :) << ironic comment).
> 
> See the rest on
> <http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/41.html>
> ....and happy new year :)
> 
> -- 
>      Giovanni Giorgi           http://www.squeak.org
>                                http://www.siforge.org
> .............................................................
> 


Thank you for your posting and beeing prepared to volunteer to advance things. I
perceive it as an honour that the GNU smalltalk representative is willing to do
more for Squeak than he already does   ;-)

May I ask you two questions of clarification and add a note.

How do you perceive the problem you want contribute to solve? To put it more
bluntly - I think we need a more concise problem discription.

You are mentioning that additional SUnit tests are needed. I agree with this. We
have about 1400 and still could need another 4000 ..8000 probably. (Eclipse BTW
has about 20'000 AFAIK). This means again we need to do set priorities. Where
do you see these priorities? And it is in fact a hard job to write tests after
the code has been written as Stephane D, Roel Wuyts and confirmed in earlier
threads in this list.

As a note I would like to propose that a useful thing in any case is to look for
another subsystem for which it is relatively easy to write a removal and adding
script. This should be followed by the proposal to remove the said subsystem
from 3.8g before releasing.  For the full image of course it should be added
again. Even if the proposal is not actually carried out at least we have the
benefit that poeple who do not want that subsystem can easily remove it from
their base image before loading other packages. Removing another subsystem
would follow the recent request by Andreas Raab that the base image shouldn't
grow anymore in number of classes.

This is actually the same thing as has you are already doing with Celeste and
thank you for maintaining it. BTW what is it's status for 3.8g?

To summarize: More quality means we need ways to assure quality and this
currently means more tests. But which ones is the question. There is probably
no easy solution.

Hannes






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