[squeak-dev] Incorrect keyboard mapping with Ctrl key in latest Smalltalk VM release (Windows 1903 64bit, squeak.cog.spur)

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Tue Dec 10 19:26:27 UTC 2019


On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 10:31 AM tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:

>
>
> > On 2019-12-10, at 10:05 AM, Nicolas Cellier <
> nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Christoph,
> > The image side is totally messy,
> > The VM side is also messy, so finding a combination that might work is a
> sport.
>
> You're not wrong. I had a bit of fun with this stuff making the Raspberry
> Pi Scratch system handle linux non-ascii type keyboard input. An
> interesting problem there was that enabling the linux extension completely
> broke something else (that I can't remember at all) and made the whole
> attempt moot.
>
>
> > To summarize: we have reached a point where we cannot change/add one
> feature without breaking one other (at least).
> > The consequence is that we have some sort of "stable" status because we
> cannot change anything (the statu quo).
>
> I suspect this is what happens to almost every complex project. I mean,
> look at how all the OS's get messed up and stall for years. They're all
> terrible right now.
>
> Supporting old images means keeping the old messy VM code around. Doing
> something new and clean means a lot of work and probably using new
> primitives or some variety of flag to request use of the new code. Then
> we'd want to decide on a time to drop the old mess.
>

See can at least comment it and corral the old messy code in ifdef's such as

#if SUPPORT_OLD_IMAGE_CHARACTER_MAPPING_CRAP
...
#endif

so that we don't have to think too hard about what we delete the next time
we have a major release that breaks image backward compatibility.  I
personally don't mind the old cruft being there.  What I hate is not
knowing what the cruft is.  The code, especially the C VM code, must be
properly documented so that it doesn't require intimate knowledge with
older versions, the history, but twiddling hacks, etc, etc.


>
> Lovely project! ;-)
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Strange OpCodes: DPC: Double Precision Crash
>
>
>
>

-- 
_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
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