[squeak-dev] "welcome" projects for 4.2

Hannes Hirzel hannes.hirzel at gmail.com
Mon Dec 20 13:54:39 UTC 2010


On Mon, 13 Dec 2010 16:44:44.004 -0300, Jecel Assumpcao Jr.
<jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
> Thanks David, Casey, Edgar, Chris and Ken for the feedback so far. It
> seems this is a good quick-and-dirty thing to do for 4.2 to make the
> possibilities of Squeak more explicit to new users without annoying
> people who just want a clean image to based their work on.
>
> Ken Brown raised a very importan point:
>> I would like to see an easy way of unloading the stuff I have temporarily
>> loaded to
>> take a look at. I would NOT like to have loaded a project, then deleted it
>> only to
>> find out that all the code that was necessary for the project, was still
>> hanging
>> around. I do not like having to rely on closing the image without saving
>> to revert
>> back to the previous state. I often find I do some messing around in a
>> Workspace
>> that I probably want to keep, but that gets blown away too when quitting
>> without
>> saving the image.
>
> It is even a little worse than you think - if you close without saving,
> the extra code will be gone from your image but will still be present in
> the .changes file. If you play with it some more the next day and again
> quit without saving, then it will be there twice. Or am I wrong about
> the interaction between loading packages and .changes?
>
> Unfortunately, I don't have a good suggestion. Unloading in general
> would require some infrastructure that we don't have and certainly won't
> have time to build for Squeak 4.2. An option would be to limit ourself
> to showing off packages that do have unload scripts available. I have no
> idea of how much "fun" this restriction would eliminate. By the way - I
> think of it all as fun, even stuff like Seaside and Aida and drivers for
> object databases; not just music and games.

What I normally when trying out a new package is to copy the whole
folder I keep the image and the changes file in. Then I load the new
packages --- if I'm pleased then I go ahead, otherwise I go back to
the copy and throw the new thing away. Not particularly elegant but
good enough for me.

So a note pointing this out in the 'Extending the system' workspace
might be appropriate.

BTW we might need another workspace of the 'Extending the system' type
named 'GUI'. It could include scripts how to load Tweak and the
Designer ( https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/trac/SqueakCommunityProjects/wiki/designer
) and some notes about Morphic and the event system (links to
explanations, e.g. http://www.scribd.com/doc/6532118/Morphicfinal --
 An Introduction to Morphic: The Squeak User Interface Framework, John Maloney ;
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2477,
http://www.elwedgo.de/fileadmin/events_in_smalltalk.pdf )

--Hannes




> In this case I imagine a typical project having a column of buttons on
> the left side like "load all", "unload all", "load seaside", "load
> pier", "load scriptaculous", "load seachart". Then you would have some
> text windows and/or bookMorphs explaining stuff and possibly some
> drawings.
>
> Another issue is how much to depend on online operation. In the past I
> have put in a lot of effort making Squeak distributions that would be
> useable to people with a CD drive but not an Internet connection. The
> fraction of our community in that situation has been significantly
> reduced (perhaps to zero?) in the past few years. So one option would be
> to have a single "Worlds of Squeak" project inside the image itself,
> with a bunch of subprojects actually living in
> http://ftp.squeak.org/4.2/worlds or something like that. Since the
> project needs to download code to show off whatever it is trying to
> demo, then having the project itself unavailable when offline won't be
> too much worse.
>
> That said, it might be a good idea to mirror those particular versions
> of the packages used inside the ftp.squeak.org/4.2 directory and always
> fetch from there so things don't break when squeaksource.org gets
> reorganized a few years down the road or some other site goes entirely
> off the air. Once that is done, having an offline "CD-ROM" mode wouldn't
> be too much extra work. But as I wrote above, it might be that this is
> no longer worth any extra work.
>
> -- Jecel
>
>
>



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