[Squeakfoundation]How to proceed for the kernel cleaning harvesting
Stephane Ducasse
ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sat Apr 5 10:25:25 CEST 2003
Hi doug and others
We are starting to make progress on the kernel cleaning. However I
would like to avoid to have 200 changesets to be included before
putting some of them in the stream.
What is important is that we are decomposing our changes (with pain
instead of doing three changes at once we really do them one by one
slowly) into
small changesets so that people can understand them. We are also
building a testSuite
that we will keep in the future as a kind of specification of what we
did. We are four working on that and we have our own internal
reviewing. We are also introducing a deprecation schema so that tools
build before the cleaning will be notified when they used an old method
and that people can query the deprecated method. This way we could
build a simple tool to identify deprecated methods and build a database
with that information for later migration.
Now the problem is that cleaning the kernel is somehow special and the
order of the changesets may be really important. So change 0001 should
be put in before 0004 for example. We are focusing on specific parts
and we have some major milestones as explained on the page.
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3083
We can document what we are doing but if for every method move we have
to write 10 lines this will never scale. Normally there is a preamble
that explain the change but often we cannot spend time motivate them
because this is obvious. So I would like to know if some harvesters are
really interested in reviewing what we are doing, we are looking for a
meta-aware one. I asked Noury (the best meta programmer I know in
france father of metaclassTalk which already cure some part of the VW
kernel for his PhD) to be an external reviewer. But he is not an
harvester but could become one (Noury?)
So as soon as our own reviewing process will finish for the first 40
changesets we will send them into the stream. But we would like to know
how to minimize energy.
Stef
Prof. Dr. Stéphane DUCASSE
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
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