<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hi,<br class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On 31 Mar 2018, at 11:45, Alistair Grant <<a href="mailto:akgrant0710@gmail.com" class="">akgrant0710@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div class=""><br class="">On 23 March 2018 at 21:52, Eliot Miranda <<a href="mailto:eliot.miranda@gmail.com" class="">eliot.miranda@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><br class="">Pharo urgently needs to upgrade the VM<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">I couldn't agree more, and I know Esteban wants to release a new VM.<br class="">I did quite a bit of testing on a VM from 15 March that I thought<br class="">would make a good candidate before realising that the Mac VMs aren't<br class="">available.<br class=""></div></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>I will try to promote then the one of 15 march. We’ll see next week. </div><div>but then, this is part of my observation: We cannot know which VMs are stable, and that’s because the *process* to make them stable is very “human dependent”: We consider a version stable when it builds on CI and Eliot says is stable. But since Eliot does not use Pharo (not a critic, a reality), that may be not true for Pharo. And that’s actually what happens, Pharo crashes. </div><div>I tried to avoid a bit this problem with our fork and nightly builds that runs the pharo tests (to knew about problems as early as possible). But to be honest I didn’t have the time (and the will) to work on it recently, then pharo fork is in practice stalled. I will revive that eventually… but just when I find the time and the spirit to do it.</div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">to one more up to date than 2017 08 27 (in fact more up-to-date than opensmalltalk/vm commit 0fe1e1ea108e53501a0e728736048062c83a66ce, Fri Jan 19 13:17:57 2018 -0800). The bug that VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320 fixes can result in image corruption in large images, and can occur (as it has here) at start-up, causing one's work to be irretrievably lost.<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">Most, if not all, the VMs between 1 Jan and 15 Mar have bugs that are<br class="">triggered either by the automated test suite or the bootstrap process.<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">The blocks I can see at the moment are:<br class=""><br class="">- Multiple builds have failed with an internal compiler error on the<br class="">sista builds.<br class="">-- The earliest occurrence I could find was commit 1f0a7da, but it may<br class="">have been earlier.<br class="">- Even if the Mac builds show success in travis, they aren't making it<br class="">on to <a href="http://files.pharo.org" class="">files.pharo.org</a>.<br class=""></div></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>latest VM copied into <a href="http://files.pharo.org" class="">files.pharo.org</a> is 16/03. </div><div>we need to see what’s happening there.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div class="">-- I haven't ever worked with this code.<br class=""><br class="">Not directly related, but:<br class="">- Bintray hasn't been updated since 8 March 2018.<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">I think it could also be useful for <a href="http://files.pharo.org" class="">files.pharo.org</a> to have release<br class="">candidate links available, which would help people to focus testing on<br class="">a particular VM. They would need to be manually maintained, but I<br class="">think the benefits would be worthwhile.<br class=""></div></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>all VMs are available to test.</div><div>just… not available *directly* to general users. </div><div>now… I could have a 70rc link in vm subdir. But since I cannot know which VM is RC I find it pointless at this moment.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>cheers, </div><div>Esteban</div><div><br class=""></div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><br class="">Cheers,<br class="">Alistair<br class=""></div></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></body></html>