[squeak-dev] Re: [Pharo-project] Just a little point

Keith Hodges keith_hodges at yahoo.co.uk
Fri Jul 10 00:03:46 UTC 2009


Andreas Raab wrote:
> Keith Hodges wrote:
>> So today I am browsing a few blogs, and I find...
>>> I submitted a simple extension of the SUnit Test Runner to the Pharo
>>> Inbox. It accurately determines the test coverage of a selected
>>> package. For the latest versions of Magritte and Pier I get the
>>> following results:
>>>
>>> Posted by Lukas Renggli at 30 March 2009, 8:57 pm
>> I thought, thats nice, I would like to use that... but I cant.
>
> And why can't you use it? Open Monticello, point it at
> http://squeaksource.com/Pharo merge it, done. I just did exactly that
> and if you now update your image from http://source.squeak.org/trunk
> you can use these extensions, too.
>
> I'm not sure how to say that gently, perhaps there is no way. But
> whining isn't going to help. There will always be people who write
> code for whatever reason. It's called competition. Monticello and
> other tools help us make it easy to synchronize between the different
> developments. I just did that (in less than 20 minutes) and suddenly
> Pharo and Squeak are in sync as far as SUnit and TestRunner are
> concerned. How's that for some progress?
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
This was only an example,

I was answering a specific point, the point that had been made was that
apparently innovation happens first, and integration will inevitably
happen at a later time.

If the community is setting a course for multiple forks, then it becomes
inevitably more difficult for one person to even carry out this
integration even if they wanted to.

This counter example, code languishing in the Testing repository since
2006 had failed to be integrated, even though it has been loadable from
Universes for most of that time, and was positioned as the new head for
everyone to work from. If people were to use it as the new head then
there wouldn't be any integration needed at all.

If you take a closer look at the differences between Testing/SUnit and
Pharo you may find that I implemented ClassClonerTestResource to assist
in testing the class side of classes, and I think that someone in Pharo
duplicated the very same work. So it is not as easy as you say if the
two branches have both seen refactorings

My point is that by putting the philosophy first, that is what leads you
to have tools like MC for interchanging code in the first place, and it
is what led me to spend time working on MC1.5. SUnit falls in to the
same category of tools that essentially have to be common across forks.

But if no one else adopts even a similar philosophy what's the point.

I still believe that if we the squeak community, profess to value
people's contributions, encourage the use of shared externally managed
projects, we can leave Pharo in the dust.

However following your "progress" now we have 3 branches of SUnit,
whereas before Pharo, there was only one, are we going backwards here or
what?

Keith





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