[BUG][FIX] StarBrowser package incompatible with SM2

Simon Michael simon at joyful.com
Tue Dec 9 15:51:34 UTC 2003


Hi Göran,

> Just wanted to say that this is not really a "BUG" - I mean, there are
> several packages that will need updating after SM2. StarBrowser is one
> of them. And this is something that we can't really avoid - SM2 has a
> new concept of releases and I have tried making SMPackage backwards
> compatible - but some issues may still be unavoidable.

Yes.. as we discussed on #squeak, I wonder how far you want to go to 
ease the transition between SM versions.

SMCard is a renamed class, which StarBrowser 5's SBSqueakMap.st tries to 
add a method to. I'm not sure how you could provide backwards 
compatibility for that situation. To get the package to load cleanly I 
defined this class and copied the method over manually.

The other issue was KomServices referencing installedVersionOf:, which 
has been renamed to installedReleaseOf:. This seems easy enough - you 
could provide the old message, probably using the new deprecation 
mechanism. I think an extra warning popup during installation is fine 
and would encourage packages to get upgraded.

With these two tweaks I was able to install SB, KomHttpServer and the 
packages that depend on them - HttpView2, Seaside, SmallWiki etc. in a 
3.7+SM2 image.

Thinking ahead to future SM upgrades, it would be nice to be able to 
keep evolving SM without breaking packages unnecessarily. Do packages 
have too much knowledge about SM right now ? Or another way of saying 
it, the protocol/interface they rely on isn't clear/stable enough ?




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