On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 12:28:00PM +0100, H. Hirzel wrote:
> On 7/10/13, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> > I just posted five updates that restore the debugger to operation in MVC
> > (for the first time since Squeak 3.8 I think). I just did an image update
> > to confirm that the trunk update stream still works, and all seems to be
> > well. However, I think there is a risk of problems that may arise for
> > people
> > updating from earlier images. Just in case anybody has a problem, here
> > are the specific package updates related to the MVC debugger fixes:
> >
> >     Tools-fbs.482 -> Tools-dtl.483
> >     ToolBuilder-Kernel-fbs.56 -> ToolBuilder-Kernel-dtl.57
> >     System-dtl.560 -> System-dtl.561
> >     ST80-fbs.146 -> ST80-dtl.147
> >     Morphic-fbs.664 -> Morphic-dtl.665
> >
> > There are still some missing implementations in ToolBuilder for MVC that
> > affect the debugger and some other tools, so that will have to be the
> > subject of future updates. But having a working debugger is certainly
> > a step in the right directly.
> >
> > If anyone asks how long it took me to figure out how to make these changes,
> > I'm going to shuffle my feet and look in the other direction and pretend
> > that I did not hear the question ;-)
> 
> > Dave
> >
> Congratulations. Many people have tried this and did not get through
> to a solution.
> But yes, the question is there, why was this so hard?
>

It was hard because the tools themselves were broken. I did it by referring
to Squeak 3.6 and 3.8 images to understand how it was supposed to work, and
by adding lots of "OSProcess trace: 'foo'" calls throughout the debugger,
tool builder, and MVC methods so I could look at console output to narrow
the problems down. I used a ProcessBrowser in MVC with auto-update enabled
to identify when extra controller processes were being activated. And I locked
up my image about a trillion times along the way ;)

By the way, the class comment for View is really outstanding. I don't know
who wrote it, but the author should get some sort of award for great
documentation. My guess is that it did not take very long to write that
comment, but over 30 years later it saved me a lot of time by providing
a clear, concise explanation of how things work in MVC. So, to whomever
wrote that documentation: Thank you!

Dave