Magma and Magma on Pharo questions

[Chris Muller]

Hi Miguel, thanks for the great questions.

> I am a little frustrated by the documentation about installing magma.
> They talk about squeak map, sar, monticello, monticello configuration. I
> know that this question has been asked *several* times before but,
> please, one more time: where can we get the latest
>
> Magma client
> Magma server
> Magma tester
>
> for both
>
> r41
> r42

Hmm.  From the Magma home page, "Getting Started With Magma", then
"Download and Install the Code".

I just checked and it's up to date.  This page describes the location
of the two places to get the latest version; SqueakMap and
SqueakSource.  Which part of this documentation has you a little
frustrated?

> and for monticello/monticello configuration. Personally I think that the
> universes, map and friends are very frustrating to cope with.

The only frustrating aspect for me was that the 3.9 image ships with
Monticello Configurations broken.  Why frustrating for you?

> Shouldn't be good, with the inminent r42 release, to create a *brand
> new* repository location and put there everything that is needed and
> nothing else (historic versions, versions with other names, etc) and in
> each page of magma on the wiki put a line pointing to that location. I
> believe that most users will use the new version and the historic ones
> shouldn't make noise here. Also, the latest version is the supported
> one, so it is wise to stay current.

Well, you are talking about a real web-site for Magma, that is on my
list for this year.  In the meantime, the Swiki pages are TSTTCPW.

On SqueakMap, I do delete the historic versions.  SqueakSource does
not provide the ability to delete Monticello Configurations, so I have
no way to delete them..

> Second question. Are there plans to support Magma on Pharo.

I don't have any concrete plans to do anything with Pharo, but I'd be
happy if someone made a Pharo version of Magma.  I believe one of
Hilaires projects runs Magma on Pharo.

But you don't need me to do that porting work; someone who is more
familiar with Pharo would do it better, because it's just a matter of
getting all the services Magma needs; Sockets, Files, Closures
extensions, etc. ported to Pharo.

Magma will run on 3.10 this year, and will always lag slightly behind
the leading development version of Squeak in terms of "support".

> I know that
> Pharo has many incompatibilities with squeak, but also, it is cleaner
> than squeak. Other thing that is happening right now in squeak is the
> integration of closures that make magma incompatible with the next
> version of squeak (I think :)) and pharo already has closures
> integrated. Shouldn't be time to have a new version for this platforms?

Yes, when 3.10 gets Closures we will need to support it.

 - Chris