updates vs. images
stéphane ducasse
ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Thu Oct 13 06:30:08 UTC 2005
Hi avi
please note that I was not complaining about MC.
I think that what you are doing is good and I trust you for that.
My problem is more at the brute force level of good people spending
time fixing important part of Squeak.
> To throw some new (and maybe novel) fuel on the recent fires around
> harvesting and the update stream: why do we need an update stream
> at all?
>
> Other Smalltalks - VisualWorks, Dolphin, etc - simply release new
> images when there are new versions, and everyone is expected to
> reinstall their code into that. Bootstrapping problems have to be
> solved once, by the vendor, and everyone uses the same resulting
> image. As long as it's simple enough to load your own packages in
> - and Monticello at least handles *that* pretty well - this should
> be pretty easy for the user. In practice, in fact, this is exactly
> what I do already - I just download the latest image Marcus puts
> out and go from there. I suspect lots of others do the same thing.
>
> Now, I realize that the update stream is more important for some
> segments of the Squeak community than for others. In Squeakland,
> most of the interesting content cannot be captured by a Monticello
> package, and is at least somewhat harder to load into a new image -
> and so the desire to update the existing image is stronger than it
> would be for those of us doing "code-only" work. I imagine similar
> concerns apply in the Tweak world, and I'm sure they do for
> Croquet. But then, don't those groups maintain update streams
> separate from what I guess we could call the "Squeak Foundation
> stream" already? I doubt things would change much there no matter
> what SqF did with its stream, including getting rid of it entirely.
>
> The reason that I propose this is that the sense I get from Marcus
> and Stef and others involved in the harvesting process is that the
> main difficulty is not one of evaluating and integrating changes,
> but of preparing those changes for the stream. Generally, it's
> easy for someone to produce a single image that's properly
> integrated, and even to record that state in a set of package
> versions suitable for people to submit changes against for later
> integration.
>
This is true.
> What's slow and unreliable is setting things up so that some other
> arbitrary image can go through the "same" set of changes. Frankly,
> although Monticello is a pretty decent tool for development work -
> it handles submitting and integrating changes fairly well - it's
> showing itself to be a really bad tool for deploying changes. On
> the other hand, images are a *great* deployment mechanism.
>
> Thoughts?
>
I agree.
I think that besides bugs that get in our way we go in the right
direction, even if better navigation possibilities in MC
would be great.
My problem is more:
when do we get real nasty bugs kill?
Semaphore revisited, weakDict or weakArray....
Stef
>
> Avi
>
>
>
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