You weren't clear about that.  Your first sentence said you "don't
want to proxify", then you said, "proxying MC ancestry is a Bad Idea"
without saying why, and finally you said, "these proxies are brittle,"
possibly suggesting that another kind of proxy besides THESE proxies
would fit better..?  I still don't know which of these three
interpretations you mean, I guess either the 2nd or 3rd since you said
not the 1st..

You've reminded me of a client years ago using VW who made me strip
the use of a Semaphore out of their code.  A simple patch and the code
they had worked beautifully (and was tested for months), but because
they had prior bad-experiences using them incorrectly, they were
unable to disassociate their fear of a possible app lock-up from
Semaphores themselves.  They blamed the Semaphore and chose to switch
to synchronous (blocking) calls for everything at the last minute
instead staying with what had already been tested.

If / when you get into the details of the problem (which, I hope you
do), and begin to wrestle with the issues of compatibility,
performance, transparency, and enabling a variable-sized lookback
history, while still preserving ALL history in case we need it -- At
that point you might strike an appreciation for how well the Proxy
solution aligns itself to the problem and associated issues.  Sure, if
its a ticking time-bomb of nitro-glycerin, we can't use it, but I
never understood why Proxy's are good for so many other similar cases
but not this one.  As with my former client, I sense there's may be an
emotional component at play.  That's totally my fail because if I had
squashed these bugs earlier we probably wouldn't be having this
conversation..

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 3:56 PM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> I am not going to argue your straw man. I am talking about MC ancestry specifically, not proxies in general, as you are well aware. You keep saying "my proxies are great if we just fix this last bug here". I disagree.
>
> - Bert -
>
> On 28.01.2014, at 22:40, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Bert, perhaps Eric Gamma would be interested in debating with you the
>> validity of Proxy pattern, I'm not.  The only thing I can do is direct
>> you to works of universally accepted design patterns [1] and scores of
>> systems that use Proxy's reliably, everyday (including Magma).
>>
>> Further, I already stated I'm not beholden to solving the problem with
>> the Proxy pattern, yet you continue to hammer your adjectives on it.
>> Why won't you say something about the problem it's targeting and/or
>> offer up one of your "much less brittle ways to achieve this..."?
>>
>> [1] -- (see Chapter 4)
>> http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented/dp/0201633612/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390944300&sr=8-1&keywords=design+patterns
>>
>> or
>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-Patterns-Smalltalk-Companion/dp/0201184621/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1390944324&sr=8-2&keywords=design+patterns+smalltalk
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 11:26 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>>>> - Don't proxify WorkingCopy ancestry for the release because we still have a bug.
>>>
>>> Chris,
>>>
>>> we don't want to proxify not just because it's buggy, but because proxying MC ancestry is a Bad Idea. There are much less brittle ways to achieve this. Our dev tools need to be rock-solid. These proxies are unpredictable and therefore have no place in a stable release.
>>>
>>> - Bert -
>
>
>
>
>