[squeak-dev] Re: Bootstrapping (Subversion

Rob Rothwell r.j.rothwell at gmail.com
Sun Jun 29 17:51:42 UTC 2008


On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 1:35 PM, nicolas cellier <ncellier at ifrance.com>
wrote:

> This is the idea of replacing a "binary blob" (the image) with an
> automatically generated "textual blob" (a textual description of the object
> graph, or a script to reconstruct object graph).
>
> Is it usable? A maintainer will use diff tools to check difference between
> two versions.
> Unfortunately, a small difference in an Object graph (think graph, not
> tree) might result in a big difference in textual representation. Such
> generator should take care to generate minimal textual diffs... That means
> diffing two general graph, analyzing previous textual representation and
> producing a textual representation closest to previous one.
>
> What a maintainer would need, is rather a new diff tool able to perform
> above operation, find the diffs between two images...
>
> A tool that analyzes a foreign image and generates a script able to convert
> this image to the foreign one...
>
> Not simple, a naive implementation would not work, for example because of
> sourcePointers, an image is not independant form it's change files...


Not simple at all!  I know this isn't exactly the same as what you are
talking about, but I saw some presentations at Smalltalk Solutions dealing
with file-based code storage and/or analysis:

http://www.stic.st/stic?content=sts08Detail#june18Detail

Using VisualWorks Store for GemStone Code Management

Porting experience report

Smalltalk Development Tools: Bringing Smalltalk to Eclipse

I think the consensus was "it's hard!"

Rob
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