Is there a central place where I could look for bug reports/solutions (other than scanning all messages to this newsgroup)?
I dropped off the list for a few months, and had to discard my 1.23 version. I just picked up the sources for 1.31 and tried to build it on Solaris 2.5.x.
The first time I did the make I got error messages from the compiler indicating unresolved symbol references, but hadn't captured them in a file, so I cleaned up and made the system again, capturing the error messages; there weren't any this time... (Why not? -- compiler got smarter, I guess )
Anyway, it built and started up nicely. I've hit one problem consistently: Play With Me - 4, which displays the "Back to the Future" memo, has this little problem: If I click on the arrow to go to the next page, the system freezes and the only way I have found to recover is to kill the process.
Anyone know of a problem like that?
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Another question: Is it possible to build the system completely from scratch, without using a preexisting image file (but with a changes file and the sources)? If I take the C sources and build the VM, can I have it build the system from the sources? How? -- where's that documented?
Thanks, joe
Anyway, it built and started up nicely. I've hit one problem consistently: Play With Me - 4, which displays the "Back to the Future" memo, has this little problem: If I click on the arrow to go to the next page, the system freezes and the only way I have found to recover is to kill the process.
Anyone know of a problem like that?
It's most likely the missing sound primitives. Try executing:
Preferences setPreference: #disableSounds toValue: true
and everything should be fine. (Well, it looks like we have to provide an FAQ for such stuff).
Andreas
Another question: Is it possible to build the system completely from scratch, without using a preexisting image file (but with a changes file and the sources)? If I take the C sources and build the VM, can I have it build the system from the sources? How? -- where's that documented?
Joe,
I think you are asking for a way of completely re-constructing an image from source files. There is currently no way to do this; we have always worked by mutating an existing image. Even the original Squeak image was mutated from the Apple Smalltalk image, which was mutated from the Xerox Smalltalk-80 image, which, for all I know, goes all the way back to some Smalltalk-76 image at Xerox PARC.
Other Smalltalk's have ways of bootstrapping an image from source files (Gnu Smalltalk and Little Smalltalk, for example), but it we've never had to do that in our evolutionary path. Note that you can easily file out the source code for all the classes in the system as a record of what's there.
I suspect it would not be too difficult to write a program (in Squeak) that parsed these files and built up a new image (in a separate memory area, like the VM simulator does). You'd have to add some additional code to initialize the System Dictionary, initialize the process scheduler, create an initial process, initialize the array of objects that must be known to the VM, and a few other such chores. You could look at the System Tracer for guidance with this. The resulting program would serve as a form of documentation for system hackers.
-- John
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