People,

Why can't we have a migration tool to help code and packages to be
ported to newer version of Squeak or even other forks? I have
mentioned the idea in the past but nobody gave any further thoughts.
We've got this wonderful entirely reflective and dynamic programming
language, which should really make it easy (or not so difficult) to
implement a migration tool.

A package maintainer would simply run his tests, migrate, rerun tests
and see what need to be fixed, if anything.

An interesting migration tool would be ActiveRecord::Migration. Though
the obvious difference between databases and programming languages,
the concept behind it has still something appealing. One can define
migration "up" and "down" using database schema definitions. I like
the idea that we could easily port and backport code with such
definitions. Then they could be either syntactic or semantic
definitions. Definitions that could eventually be either manually
written and/or generated automatically from deltas.

All of a sudden, it would make porting code and packages something
that can be handled with little efforts. And the community would
definitively be more open to changes since it wouldn't break that much
code with such tool in action. =)

Yes|No|Abort ?

Ian.

-- 
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/