[Slightly OT] Source code management

Andreas Raab Andreas.Raab at gmx.de
Wed Feb 6 16:54:30 UTC 2002


Hey Tim, I was making a joke here. I mentioned neither who tried to
convince me about this (and, no, I didn't refer to you) nor how these
sources should be centralized (although you were right that it referred
to SF). And no, I didn't mention nor mean that VMMaker has _anything_ at
all to do with this issue. I see the design goals of VMMaker as a
valuable asset to the Squeak community (but you know that). 

The problem's we're seeing are not related to VMMaker but to the (yet
undiscussed) question about _what_ design works well depending on the
various platforms and the working styles of people involved (and I'm not
altogether happy with the current structure of the platforms tree but
you know that too) as well as the question of where the "reference
location" for support code is and who might get write access to what
part. And you also know that my primary reason for not liking the idea
of a central repository for everything is just that you never know who
might (accidentally or not) mess up completely unrelated code. That's
all I was referring to.

Sorry about that - I certainly didn't mean to accuse you of anything.

Cheers,
  - Andreas

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> [mailto:squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On 
> Behalf Of Tim Rowledge
> Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2002 5:22 PM
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: [Slightly OT] Source code management
> 
> 
> cg at home.cdegroot.com (Cees de Groot) is claimed by the 
> authorities to have written:
> 
> > Andreas Raab <Andreas.Raab at gmx.de> said:
> > >> I'll never, ever, go back to a single central repository 
> > >> without a lot of screaming and kicking ;-)
> > >
> > >Heh, heh. Tell that to guys who're trying to convince me 
> that There Must
> > >Be Only One central repository for VM sources ;-)
> > >
> > Easy. 'Only One' in CVS terms translates in 'only one 
> canonical one to 
> > make releases from', IMHO. And as soon as VMMaker 
> stabilizes, even that won't
> > be necessary, I think.
> 
> I don't think I've actually heard _anyone_ say 'there must be 
> only one'.
> 
> Certainly I haven't said it.
> 
> In fact, I haven't made any demands at all on where sources are kept.
> What I _Do_ believe is that it is a good idea is to make it 
> feasible for
> all platforms to share a single _design_ of code tree so that a tool
> like VMMaker can rely on it enough to be able to work for all 
> platforms.
> 
> However, once you have such a code tree it is rather easy to keep all
> the platforms' sources in one place together. It has various 
> advantages,
> such as being a reminder to people changing anything that they really
> ought to check that the change works for other platforms or at least
> have the manners to let other people know about the change before
> releasing it in such a way that it doesn't break all other ports. You
> know, personal responsibility instead of smarminess and other such
> matters related to actually working together.
> 
> A repository (such as cvs for example) also has the nice property of
> providing an audit trail, retractability, etc etc. Sourceforge happens
> to provide a free service of keeping a cvs repository and 
> backing it up.
> Is there something terrible about making use of such a 
> service? We even
> have sqCVS available to control things directly from the image. Any
> repository that allows easy access to fetch sources in a manner
> convenient would be acceptable eventually but why is it _so_ terrible
> the way it is now?  
> 
> VMMaker is simply a tool to cleanup and unify the messy code for
> generating vm source that exists in the image; it removes the static
> Strings to a file tree (saving half a meg of image size) and 
> provides a
> uniform file tree for the platform specific code. It allows simple
> configuration of which plugins should be built and whether they should
> be built internal or external. It assists in development of plugins by
> making it a little easier to regenerate as you develop the code. It
> allows you to generate the vm for other platforms than the one you are
> running on. It is scriptable for batch building of vms.
> 
> Although we're not there yet (quite), it should be possible soon to
> fetch the platforms code tree from SF, open the VMMakerTool, press two
> buttons and get a vm code tree built. You would then do whatever
> incantations makes executables on your machine and bang, there is a vm
> and all requested plugins. At the moment you would also need to fetch
> and filein the VMMaker changeset.
> 
> Is there something objectionable about this, other than the fact that
> _I_ wrote it? Do people think that creating a vm should be 
> kept as hard
> as possible for some reason?
> 
> 
> -- 
> Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
> Useful random insult:- Overdue for reincarnation.
> 
> 
> 





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