On Apr 12, 2008, at 8:39 AM, David T. Lewis wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 10:47:02AM -0600, Hal Eden wrote:
>> hi,
>>
>> with je77 having graduated and moving on to a career path, future
>> directions for swiki development are not clear.

<snip, snip>

> Hal,
>
> The best analogy I can think of is the Squeak virtual machine itself.
> Development is handled by four principle maintainers with occasional
> contributions from a few others. The VM consists of Smalltalk code
> (in the "VMMaker" package) along with external support code (C code,
> makefiles, icons, etc).
>
> The Smalltalk part of the VM is managed in Montecello (but is not yet
> on SqueakSource :-/ ). All of the rest in managed in a Subversion
> repository at www.squeakvm.org. You could adopt a similar scheme for
> Swiki, in which you maintain the Smalltalk package on SqueakSource,  
> and
> the external support files in a traditional version control repository
> such as Subversion or CVS.
>
> The Squeak VM development relies on people working separately in  
> different
> parts of the world, supporting a wide range of computer platforms, and
> keeping track of the version compatibility between the Smalltalk part
> (VMMaker) and the support files (in Subversion). It's not perfect, but
> if it works for the VM, it should be possible to make it work for  
> Swiki.
>

are there any subversion tools for squeak to ease that coordination?  
(haven't found any yet...)
my impression is that while the VM maker is used to generate the code,  
for the rest of the activity, external tools are used. this is  
somewhat different for the swiki, since most of the manipulation of  
the "swiki source" takes place in the swiki browser.

still might work, though.

> One suggestion, personal opinion and others might not agree: If you  
> can
> find a way to keep the Swiki support files in Smalltalk such that they
> can also be maintained in Montecello, I think the overall environment
> would be simpler in terms of version coordination and distribution. I
> don't know if that is feasible in the case of Swiki, but it's worth
> considering.

yeah, that's the direction i was thinking. i was trying to get some  
sense of whether that was seen as a reasonable approach by those who  
knew a bit more about monticello than i do.

i was looking at some of the MC2 stuff, and the fact that the unit of  
versioning has changed and the use of the idea of slices seem like  
they are steps in the right direction. the parts that seems to be the  
most difficult are the templates and the resources such as icons.
>
> You might also want to browse the archive of the vm-dev mailing list
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/ to get a feel for
> what goes on there.

thanks, dave, i'll do that.
and thanks for the feedback.

>
>
> Dave
>
>