[Seaside-dev] expand Grease to support portability between Pharo versions?

[Philippe Marschall]

2010/10/11 Dale Henrichs <dhenrich at vmware.com>:
> Julian,
>
> Have you considered that Grease could be used to ease porting applications
> between Pharo versions?
>
> As Pharo moves forward older versions of Pharo will have the same
> portability issues that exist between different dialects of Smalltalk...
>
> The portability issues that I've seen are not fundamental issues, but
> peripheral issues like Preferences and the required use of 'Smalltalk os'
> and 'Smalltalk globals' as the object behind the Smalltalk global has
> changed it's class...
>
> In my mind the reason for making the changes are certainly good ones, but
> from a backward compatibility perspective they create "silly portability"
> problems like we've just had that keep a perfectly good project from running
> on older versions of Pharo, just like they cause portability headaches for
> folks porting that code to another dialect (I have yet to add #globals and
> #os to my Smalltalk poxy class:).
>
> If these changes were included in Grease it would mean that folks with a
> portability problem, could load Grease and address the handful of obvious
> known problems ...

Not too eager to do this:
 - AFAIK Pharo has a policy of deprecating stuff for two releases
before removing it.
 - Seaside has a policy of deprecating stuff for one release before removing it.
 - When you move to a new Seaside version you're IMHO likely to move
to a new Pharo version as well because that's probably less effort
 - Providing backwards compatibility is a major PITA, limits you
severely in the changes you can make and is a lot of effort. I see how
this is valuable to companies so they don't have to keep their code up
to date. But that's why such services and usually provided for money.

Cheers
Philippe