Why multiple change files?

Trygve Reenskaug trygver at ifi.uio.no
Mon Mar 8 11:32:49 UTC 2004


Stef,
I think you confuse two purposes:
    A lab journal records everything that is done in a series of experiments,
    including unsuccessful experiments (penicillin was discovered by an 
unsuccessful experiment)

    A report gives a succinct description of the results of a series of 
experiments.

You describe tools for the report. They have always been in the form of 
fileIns, I'm sure Monticello if excellent for that. I am talking about 
tools for the lab journal, collected semi-automatically. Perhaps I am 
exceptional in needing a journal to remember exactly what I have done.

--Trygve

At 08.03.2004 11:04, you wrote:
>hi Trygve
>
>Still I think that you should once experiment with the notion of build. A 
>building process: reproduceable and
>automated sequences of instructions that produce your system.
>
>When I started coding in Smalltalk I have a lot of images and this was the 
>mess. Then I discovered Envy
>(not really user friendly) but this was the place where I published all my 
>code. Then I arrived the morning
>took a fresh image, click on my last build, or the one five days ago 
>because I knew the one of yesterday was not the one
>I wanted and in ***one*** click I got that. No million of redondant images 
>anymore.
>
>Images are cool and sweet places to live, hack. But there are not a good 
>process to reproduce an artifact in time.
>Now I use Store (not really sexy too) but we coordinate 6 PhD and 
>researchers on related but not the same project
>in the past I spent ***hours*** releasing script so that people could load 
>the latest versions...now one click.
>Now we can track who did what, rollback. create new build....
>
>You can achieve the same without tool support. This means that I have one 
>specification: similar to the  sar preamble I sent you where I specify how 
>to reproduce the version 25 of my environment (ie load MW, load turtle 36, 
>execute that, do that.... I should load in this order all these files. 
>Until now I keep all the cs in a huge directory but I have different build 
>environment scripts so that when I want to get back in time I need one 
>click to load. I force myself to throw away images.
>
>Now with monticello the process is easier. I'm migrating to that. For 
>example, I load the breakOut, changes some code and publish it. I open a 
>new image check if everything is ok. It is ok then all the code is stored 
>into different folders and I can access them all the time. no need 10 mb 
>for 124k of St code.
>
>Imagine
>         Squat plus a script = Squeak + another one = OORAM
>         Squat plus a script = Squeak + stef one = Caro and Bot
>
>What I can tell you is that once you have a build process, you feel much 
>stronger and secure because you know
>that in one click you can reproduce and be in the same state as before.
>So this is worth to try and this is not against images. The two are 
>different aspects of the same activities.
>
>Stef
>
>PS: measure the time you spend building your environment. I can tell you 
>that now this time is only the loading time
>of code for me and in the MOOSE environment we have around 300 classes and 
>with CodeCrawler 450.
>
>
>
>
>


-- 

Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: trygver at ifi.uio.no
Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver
N-0378 Oslo           Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
Norway





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