[V3dot10] Re: stable 3.10 universe

[Lex Spoon]

Hey, Ralph,

Actually we mostly agree.  Let's go through this carefully.

Rest assured that I want there to be a package universe that is living
and has lots of updates.  The "development" universe serves this role,
and it should continue to exist.

On the other hand, I believe it is a digression to talk about having a
development universe for Squeak 3.10, one for 3.9, etc.  While this is
an interesting possibility, I do not know of anyone working on it.
Thus, surely we should table such discussions until there is someone
interested in maintaining such a universe.

Thus the one thing where we really need to talk is about having fixed,
static releases at all.  Would you agree that there should be fixed
releases of the image itself?  We have always done so in Squeak, and I
see no reason to stop now.  These things are useful if you are using
Squeak in a class or if you are building robust software on top of
Squeak.  Either way, you do not want things that worked yesterday, to
stop working today, just because somebody posted an update that breaks
your code.

The same reasoning applies to package universes.  If your code depends
on other packages, then your code should not stop working tomorrow
just because somebody posted an updated version of that package.  You
would like the set of packages you depend on to basically be fixed.
(You can still update packages on a case by case basis, but this again
is a digression.  Let me just say you can do this, so long as you have
a static set of packages as a starting point.)

I have already done this for two Squeak versions, 3.7 and 3.9, and it
appears to be useful.  I have taught classes based on the 3.7 one, and
I noticed that later teachers of that class did the same thing.

So what do you think now about having the final 3.10 point to a static
universe of carefully chosen packages?  To support this, I have now
populated the "squeak310" universe based on the current "development"
universe.  Thus it is no longer any kind of step backwards to update
the next 3.10 image to point to it.



Finally, on the note of testing:

> Also, you need to test every package in the package universe.  The
> biggest problem is that a lot of the packages have problems.  But you
> probably don't want to release those anyway.  I can give you my
> script, or you can use Keith's system and make your own script.  That
> part is easy.

I agree this is nice, but disagree with the "need".  Someone has to do
all the work.  The best thing of all for me would be if someone
stepped up and said they want to work on finalizing a distribution of
packages for 3.10.  If nobody steps up, however, I can at least commit
to checking for obvious load errors and for checking Mantis for major
bugs.  More than that I cannot commit to.



Lex Spoon