[squeak-dev] How may I contribute in documenting classes ?

radoslav hodnicak rh at 4096.sk
Sat Aug 18 08:18:58 UTC 2012


Squeak's development happens on http://source.squeak.org
You can just write comments for classes and commit these changes (changed
packages) to the Inbox project, which is writable by anyone. I guess
ideally you'd use a trunk image with the latest updates. Contributions from
the Inbox can be then moved into the trunk by trunk developers (or not).

rado

On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 9:29 AM, dimitris chloupis <thekilon at yahoo.co.uk>wrote:

> I am using squeak, I am learning it and I am loving it. I know its not
> perfect, I know it has it faults , but I feel I finally found an enviroment
> that I can do what I always want "live coding"
>
> As you can imagine as a begineer I spent a lot of time in system browser
> and I am suprised by the lack of documentation to some basic classes. Now I
> am probably the last person to qualify as a person to document those
> classes since my experience is very limited with Squeak and smalltalk.  But
> I feel that some documentation even if its a partial one , is better than
> no documentation. And since I am already reading so much of the souce , why
> not save people's time and mine (I can foget easily the code I read and so
> a documentation string can help me remember) by adding documentation
> strings to classes and their methods.
>
> The only things I dont know is how to make those documentations port back
> to squeak standard distribution. I assume would need some commit rights to
> the squeak source ?
>
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* dimitris chloupis <thekilon at yahoo.co.uk>
> *To:* The general-purpose Squeak developers list <
> squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> *Sent:* Saturday, 18 August 2012, 10:09
> *Subject:* Re: [squeak-dev] Why FFI is not included with latest squeak ?
>
> First thank you all for your answers. Suffice to say I have installed FFI
> from source.squeak , Win32 refuses to install for me(I am on MacoOSX if
> that is of any importance [Lion]).
>
> The argument that "we dont include FFI because we dont want to encourage
> people to use it instead of smalltalk" is something that does not convince
> me. FFIs exist included in implementations of all languages I have
> programmed with Python , Java, Common lisp (ccl) , Free Pascal etc . I was
> a python developer so far, ctypes which is the interface of python itself
> is used exactly because ( though its way slower than writing C extensions )
> it allows coders to stick with python and make code easier to port across
> platforms. In my experience coders dont use FFIs just for the fun for it,
> because they are not fun , they can be a pain in the hat. Also a coder
> preferring FFI from the comfort of the amazing smalltalk debugger is
> something I have a very hard time imagining. People use FFIs because well ,
> they want to acess a functionality that the existing libraries just do not
> offer and that functionality exist on OS level anyway that will require
> some mangling with C. So no I dont think FFI will ever reduce the
> portability of squeak or that FFI libraries will start to pop up like
> mushrooms.
>
> Its not such an issue for me because : a) I can provide an image that will
> have FFI included b) unlike python squeak distribution system (monitcello)
> not only does not suck but seems to work quite well.
>
> " Many applications do not need FFI"  that could be said for a lot of
> smalltalk libraries already included with squeak. For example I have not
> seen many apps in squeak source make use of etoys ( I love etoys by the way
> and one of the reason I prefer Squeak from Pharo and is potentially
> necessary for a project I am making). I dont think that is a good excuse as
> well. Libraries dont need to be super popular to be included in a language
> implementations they are included to offer a more "complete" experience to
> the code as long they provide "basic" functionality and not something that
> is highly specialised.
>
> In any case I asked the question not because I want to force the inclusion
> of FFIs but because its the first time in last decade or so that I use a
> language implementation that does not come included with an FFI and tham
> made me curious about the reason behind this. In any case I love what you
> have done with Squeak, I really enjoy using it and even though it lacks
> documentation in several areas it really is easy to understand what is
> going on because of the overall architecture and the elegance of tools like
> inspector, and browser. Let me state all the above is my personal opinion
> and not an effort to play it smart or being rude, just geniune curiosity.
>
>
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>
> *To:* "ma.chris.m at gmail.com" <ma.chris.m at gmail.com>; The general-purpose
> Squeak developers list <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> *Cc:* The general-purpose Squeak developers list <
> squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> *Sent:* Friday, 17 August 2012, 21:21
> *Subject:* Re: [squeak-dev] Why FFI is not included with latest squeak ?
>
> On 16.08.2012, at 22:28, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Many applications do not need FFI, so it including would add
> > unnecessary (in many cases) bits to the footprint.
> >
> > FFI is a one-click install from SqueakMap, which can be accessed
> > programmatically via the Installer class, which is included with
> > Squeak.
> >
> > HTH.
>
> Right. Also, if we included it by default, people might think it is okay
> to use for providing basic functions. If FFI calls started to creep into
> the basic image we would lose the big advantage of platform independence.
>
> - Bert -
>
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 12:16 PM, kilon <thekilon at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> >> I was wondering why I need to install FFI and why it is not included by
> >> default. Any programming language I have used included at least a
> single FFI
> >> with it in its implementations or at least something similar.
> >>
> >> Is there a specfic reason why its not included ?
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> View this message in context:
> http://forum.world.st/Why-FFI-is-not-included-with-latest-squeak-tp4644264.html
> >> Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> >>
> >
>
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