On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 08:40:08PM -0500, Chris Muller wrote:
> Hi Dave, I did some thinking today about what you were saying in the
> meeting about PunchedCard and new Squeak releases.  PunchedCard has
> not needed any changes for eons.  Its non-intrusive and so will
> probably work for several more future Squeak releases.
> 
> So why we should we have to do a manual exercise of tagging it with
> "Squeak4.5" in SqueakMap?  It's a good question.
> 
> I think the easiest and most natural approach for projects at rest is
> to simply let them remain at rest.  We don't _need_ to tag PunchedCard
> as "Squeak4.5" until the moment someone desires enough that
> information to be documented in the catalog.  At which time we want it
> to be very easy -- no need for new SM Release if no changes, just the
> category assignment.

As the maintainer of (Bob Arning's excellent) PunchedCards, here is what
I want to be able to do when a new Squeak release is declared, such as
Squeak 4.5:

1) I will test the package and make sure that it works on the new Squeak
release.

2) After confirming that it works, I want to update some attribute of the
current release (which is "2.0" for PunchedCards) to declare that it
works on Squeak 4.5, and that it should appear on the list of safely
available packages in a Squeak 4.5 image.

What I specifically do not want to do is declare a new release of
PunchedCards for Squeak 4.5. The reason that I do not want to do this
is that there has been no change to PunchedCards, and if I were to
tell people that a "new release" was available, this would imply that
something has changed in PunchedCards to support Squeak 4.5 when in
fact nothing of the sort has happened.

> 
> Until then, nothing stops anyone from downloading the current
> PunchedCard "2.0" version in Squeak 4.5 even though its not tagged for
> it.  If it is found not to work in 4.5 (or some future release), we at
> least have the tag documenting the last version of Squeak it was known
> to work in.  They could run it there and if they care enough they'll
> update it for 4.5 and add a new catalog entry.

This is exactly what I do not want. The user should not have to guess
about this. I actually *did* test the current release of PunchedCards on
the new release of Squeak, and I have confirmed that it works. I want to
communicate that fact to potential users of PunchedCards. I do not want
the user to have to guess about it after I already went to the trouble
of testing to confirm that it works.

In the unlikely event that something actually changes in the PunchedCards
package (such as adding the capabiity of filing out Squeak source to a
stack of virtual punched cards, but I digress), then I want to declare
a new release at the time. And I will want to test that new release, and
have some way to declare what versions of Squeak it works with. But until
that time, I do not want to declare a new release of PunchedCards.

Dave


> 
> The SqueakMap client window should be replaced to look more like a
> System browser..  Categories | Packages | Releases across the top,
> with notes where the code pane is..