Hi guys!

Ken Causey <ken at kencausey.com> wrote:
> I'm replying temporarily for Goran as he doesn't have email access at
> the moment.
> 
> There has been some trouble with the new SqueakMap version and it is
> probable that your additions were lost when the server failed and had to
> be restarted.  If you could please try it again.  As I am sending this
> Goran is watching and may be able to catch something.
> 
> I expect Goran will reply within the next 24 hours with more detailed
> information.

Yes. :) See below:
 
> On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 23:08 +0100, St=E9phane Rollandin wrote:
> > hello,
> >=20
> >   a few days ago, et today again, I tried to register with no success a=20
> > new package on SqueakMap, called StringFormat. what happened twice is=20
> > quite strange: I could create the package without trouble, but I could=20
> > not register a release (a red message saying "something went wrong" is=20
> > the only feedback I got)

Ok, can't tell what the problem was - but we have now configured SM
running in VNC in debug mode so whenever a new issue pops up I should
have a debugger in there waiting for me. :)

> >   at this point the package stayed for a while on SqueakMap (one hour or=20
> > so ?), and then simply vanished. as long as it was listed on the=20
> > packages list page, the link to "new objects" did not respond. when the=20
> > package disappeared from the list and the whole SqueakMap, "new objects"=20
> > worked again fine, but my object was gone.

Yes, this sounds similar to what happened with Hexconverter (another new
package) which for some really odd reason ended up with an instvar being
nil (one that was only assigned once in initialize to "TimeStamp current
asSeconds"). I don't know what that was all about - but it trips up the
"new objects" link (which sorts on dates). Anyone heard of "TimeStamp
current asSeconds" throwing an Exception? That would explain it, but it
seems pretty far fetched. :)

I also believe that this problem tripped up the checkpointing mechanism
which of course makes all clients "hang" when trying to get updates from
the net. At some occasions the server also "pegged" the CPU. So I
restarted it - and that was probably what caused your package to
"vanish" suddenly because it would lose the last transaction when
restarting without having done the checkpoint. Sorry about that.

> >   I am quite puzzled. what is happening ? it looks like some kind of=20
> > cleaning mechanism has taken the power in SM logic. did someone else=20
> > experiment this ?

Hehe, nah - the cleaning is my doing, but the only way I could get the
server back up given how it uses ImageSegments etc.
It has been pretty stable over the years but obviously some bugs crept
into the latest release causing it to hang - and I think I know what it
might be, but will get back on that later on.

Now I would like you to go through the "pain" again so that I can debug
this in VNC. I tried myself creating a new package, but of course - it
worked perfectly. ;)

regards, Göran

PS. I did fix two small issues last night which actually could be
related with this - but I am not sure. We will see.