[squeak-dev] Finishing 5.2 (was Re: Project for 'after 5.2 release')

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Sun Aug 12 22:15:42 UTC 2018



> On 12-08-2018, at 1:33 PM, Fabio Niephaus <lists at fniephaus.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Aug 12, 2018 at 7:24 PM tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> 
[snip]
> I'm not sure if it's still in there (really, it should never have been but that's a different story) but the image header used to have some data specifying a window size. You *could* do a little header manipulation to set it to whatever size you think appropriate post-save.
> 
> It's still there, but I'd like to avoid manipulating the header manually. The VM should do the right thing anyway...

Well, now that is an interesting can of annelids to access. I've long argued that there should be no need for that info in the header because there should be no window getting opened until and unless the image code requests it. The RISC OS vm for example only opens the main window if a copyBits writes something to the Display form; that way a headless system needs no silly command line flag etc - just have your image not write to a window! I mean, wow, how innovative is that?

What I claim ought to happen is something along the lines of
image starts.
some code writes to a window.
image works out useful things like host screen size(s), any environment or config file or in-image size requests and how to format the content to suit.
Host window opens and displays said content.

Since we can't do all that this week, I suspect that fudging the image header data is probably the least-worst solution for now. It might be possible to set the build machines to pretend to have a suitable window size in some way but you're probably looking at some time-consuming digging to find out how to get it right for each platform.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
"#define QUESTION ((bb) || !(bb))  - Shakespeare."




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