[squeak-dev] [ANN] MCInfoProxy

Chris Muller asqueaker at gmail.com
Thu Aug 15 19:24:35 UTC 2013


[>> It happens to not find "XML-Parser-Alexandre_Bergel.20". No idea why it's
>> trying to look for that. Not all merged versions are in trunk, by design.
>
> The original MC documentation says ALL versions are intended to be contained
> by repositories.  I have no idea what "design" you're talking about.
>
> The idea is that versions are self-contained. When I merge two versions, I
> only need to share and upload the result. That means that you will not find
> that other version in your repo. But the merged version has all ancestry
> data in it (you know that).

Did you notice that I uploaded ALL interim versions of
Monticello-cmm.[552-557]?  Why would I do that when technically I only
needed to upload 557?

Because MC functions depend on the ancestry model matching what's in
the repositories.  Keeping all versions supports incremental
development and rollback.  Besides that we should just maintain an MC
model that is "whole" and operational rather than broken.  Are you
concerned about disk space?

> I'm not aware of any current use of proxies in Squeak trunk.

Great then it's high time that Squeak has a working example of this
well-known design pattern in the image.

>> I'd rather revert this whole thing, to be honest. If you're trying to
>> build a minimal image for deploying an application you would be better off
>> unloading MC altogether.
>
> It's not just about smaller images.  It's about sustainability of the
> ancestry.
>
> But as soon as you use MC it needs the ancestry anyway.

Not all of it.  We're up to version 600+ of Morphic, when was the last
time version 1 of Morphic was needed?  But we continue to carry that
around, in and out of the system, forever.  It's a gradual decline,
unsustainable.

Levente and I are interested in addressing this.

(From the other note)
> Well, I didn't complain right away ;)

< 24 hours dude.  ;)

> It sounded like a neat idea at first,
> but then I remembered that one of the things I really like about Monticello
> is its clarity and simplicity. Everything is very concrete, whereas proxies
> are very meta by nature.

We haven't lost clarity or simplicity.  That's the nice thing about
this solution, it changes _nothing_ about the MC model.  It's very
transient, all-in-memory.  There's no disaster scenario.

I've use much more complicated MagmaProxies, millions of them,
everyday for years.  They work.  The issue you experienced was
predicted in my "Special Notes".  Please don't surrender yet.


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