vze26m98 <vze26m98 at optonline.net> wrote:

> If I had one comment to make, it is that the information and
> documentation on the Squeak Wiki is not well pruned. You have a lot of
> old information co-existing with the newest. The "Porting Chapter" of
> the White book is an example: there may be useful info there, but the
> basic startup info is not current.
Yes, it can be quite tricky t keep all that info up to date. Apart from
anything one forgets all the place sit exists and then misses some. And
yes, Ian's chapter in the nublu book (not the white book) is probably
pretty out of date by now. But then so are many of the others,
including mine.

> 
> The Wiki pages also aren't date stamped as far as I can tell, so it's
> hard to figure out what's the latest info, as the Wiki has links to both
> obsolete and current info. For example, the VMMakerTool info doesn't
> make a claim, as I remember, that it supercedes the info on
> InterpreterSupportCode, (or is the recommended method for x.x version
> and beyond), etc.
Possibly so. I'll try to make time to improve that.
> 
> The problem I had was that VMMakerTool doesn't semm to like path
> directories other than ./src, which I finally found out by rolling over
> the path label and getting some balloon help to that effect. This
> information should be in the help file.
It works ok for me if I enter src2 etc. In fact I regularly use that to
have different experimental sources in different places. It is quite
possible that some paths on some platforms will cause trouble. I've
said it before and I'll probably say it again; directory and file
naming is horribly broken right now.
> 
> It was compounded with the ambiguities of what the CVS source modules
> should be called after they are checked out from SourceForge. Once I had
> understood my problem was with directories, it was pretty easy to figure
> out, although I am still unable to get VMMakerTool to let me shift
> between (Mac OS, Win32, etc.) platform modules.
Ah, well you may be the first person to actually try that trick. There
ought not be a problem  at the vmmaker end but the possible line-end
issues and makefile guff could be problematic.
> 
> 
> > Building a custom configuration of VM is pretty simple from the
> > VMMaker end but you'll need to get very friendly with your
> > platforms's make and compiler. Being on good terms with a
> > debugger is useful as well.
> 
> VMMAkerTool produced an "interp.c" that seems to compile very easily. I
> get a bunch of Warnings on functions that are declared as "int," but do
> not return a value. Not sure whether this is an issue yet or not.
It's not an issue in practise for all major platforms. We have made
occasional efforts to generate better code in this respect but it's
bloody painful. Change one method to have 'correct' typing nd you have
to fix another which leads to another.... Damn static types. What dimwit
thought up that particular stupid idea? Play with compiler flags to turn
off such warnings if you like a quiet life.
> 
> . . . . . . .
> 
> I've been trying to compile MacMinimal.c, as a simple wrapper to base my
> work on, and am getting a few (16) errors because functions are being
> redeclared,
Ugh! I really doubt that macminimal stuf is up to date. Where did you
even get it from? Doesn't exist in my platforms tree.


tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Old programmers never die; they just branch to a new address.