Refactoring Browser - new release, new home and other news.

danielv at netvision.net.il danielv at netvision.net.il
Sat Oct 5 23:01:49 UTC 2002


The URL for the impatient -
http://modules.squeakfoundation.org/People/dvf/Packages/Refactory.st

The SqueakMap entry -
http://marvin.bluefish.se:8000/sm/package/2b1e12d7-3d60-481d-975e-3eca5a
ef50b9

To open it, RefactoringBrowser openBrowser.

Welll, it's been a long time since I've released the RB, and the last
release wasn't the most friendly out-of-box. A few reasons you will like
this release -
* Simplified install
This release is a single 1MB .st file. Just download and filein. Or, if
you have some SqueakMap based tool, like the SM Browser by Goran or my
Package Loader, you can bring it up, pick the Refactoring Browser,
choose to install, and you're done.
* It works
Tests are green, some basic sanity checking works on a clean 3.2 4956
image. Of course there are probably bugs hidden somewhere in there, but
that I need you to help me with that.
* Lint works again
Thanks to Alexandre Bergel and Lukas Renggli, who fixed that and a few
other issues in CS at ESUG, this year in Douai.

More detailed version information is at the SqueakMap page.

The release process changed quite a bit on the way to this release:
I was very annoyed with maintaining the 15 (!) different files of code,
by abusing changesets to keep the layers separate. Abuse your tools and
you'll get sore thumbs. The world is consistent that way. Making a
release was long, downloading and installing was annoying, testing it
was hard and time consuming. So when things were broken, they didn't get
fixed, which makes for very lousy maintenance.

Using Avi Bryant's ModuleFiler, I am able to file out the related system
categories and all their  class extensions to the base image with one
operation, creating one file. The normal system categories and method
categories keep my layering information intact and more consistent than
I could with changesets.

Thanks to SqueakMap, it's now a snap to download, install and update new
versions, and will soon even be easy to upload and publish new versions
too.

Easy management will make for less laborious releases, and hopefully
better maintenance.

So you're welcome to download, install and play with it, and please let
me know of any trouble you encounter.

Daniel Vainsencher



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list