newbie question (different newbie) - getting changes into Squeak problems

Peter Smet peter.smet at flinders.edu.au
Tue Jul 13 00:48:11 UTC 1999


Josh,

You have raised a good point here. In theory, if you post it to this group,
labelled [ENH] in the subject line, then it will be considered for future
incorporation by the Squeak team at Disney. That's the theory. In practise,
there appear to be a lot of change sets just rotting in the electronic
hinterland. A while ago, I changed atRandom to get rid of some duplicate
code - it was a small change, but I am convinced the change was better
factored than the original (which STILL has the duplicated code). I posted
the change, but it just atrophied somewhere. A similar thing happened when I
found a bug in collection with: do: if the collections were uneven sizes.

If we are to encourage people like yourself and others to contribute to
Squeak, we must give them immediate feedback - yes, this will go into the
image, yes it will go into an add-on package, or no, it has the following
problems. This just doesnt happen, but IMO it is important that it should. A
good example is the improvements to the Date class Alan L recently posted.
These appear to fix some problems in Date, but I nor anyone else has any
idea what is going to happen to this code. Similarly, I have dropped many
hints that the exception framework of Craig Latta should be incorporated
into the base image. This framework, as well as an improvement in compiled
method have been around for months, but many people are not aware of them
because they have not been incorporated.

What's worse is that the Disney team have their own internal update stream
that we are not privy to. Recently, this resulted in a lot of duplicated
effort by people on the list, fixing a bug that was already well and truly
fixed. Now I realise that the Disney team are probaby working flat out on
Squeak etc, but I strongly feel that there should be a WEEKLY post informing
everyone of all the new changesets that have been accepted and rejected into
the base image. After all, cooperation isn't going to happen if people don't
get some kind of feedback.


Peter

>While not a bug, I did run across an inefficient implementation of String
>>
>lineCorrespondingToIndex.

>Is it worth posting things like this?  The method doesn't appear to be used
>anywhere except my code, but unless I'm overlooking something it should be
>faster.
>
>





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