[squeak-dev] Monticello's Package Loading Strategy (Bug)

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Tue Jun 27 22:19:35 UTC 2017


Hi All, Hi Bert, Hi Colin,

    today I was working with Ron Teitelbaum on porting the Terf client to
Squeak 6.x.  The bootstrap builder creates some base MCConfigurations and
then updates them from the various repositories, hence downloading the
latest versions of certain packages into the package cache.

Some of the downloaded packages are for Tweak, and Tweak classes include
field definitions which require special Monticello support to manage.  The
special handling is provided by the TweakMC package.  Here are some of the
relevant definitions:

MCStWriter>>visitTweakFieldDefinition: definition
self writeTweakFieldDefinition: definition


MCStWriter>>writeTweakFieldDefinition: definition
self chunkContents: [:s | definition printDefinitionOn: stream]

which produces output like the following in the snapshot.st file:

CCostumeGrid defineFields: '<?xml  version="1.0" ?>
<fields>
        <field toGet="origin" toSet="origin:"
changeEvent="originChanged">origin</field>
        <field toGet="extent" toSet="extent:"
changeEvent="extentChanged">extent</field>
        <field toGet="enabled" toSet="enabled:"
changeEvent="enabledChanged">enabled</field>
        <field toGet="visible" toSet="visible:"
changeEvent="visibleChanged">visible</field>
        <field toGet="color" toSet="color:"
changeEvent="colorChanged">color</field>
</fields>'!

Note that no special support is needed for producing the snapshot.bin
because that can save arbitrary objects.

So, (I think) because we were loading packages saved by Squeak V3 into a
Squeak Spur image the binary isn't loaded and instead the source is
compiled. (Am I right?)  If the update happens *before* TweakMC has been
loaded then the packages that get installed into package-cache are missing
all the field definitions because the support to produce them is missing.

This was exactly our situation; we're freshly bootstrapping a Terf image,
which includes adding support for Tweak, and TweakMC is loaded by the
bootstrap /after/ the configurations have been updated, and hence the Tweak
packages in the package-cache are corrupted.

We fixed our issue by modifying the bootstrap to load TweakMC up front.
But IMO *this shouldn't be necessary*.

Why, when Monticello downloads a package from a repository, does it rewrite
that package to install it in the package-cache directory?  Surely it has
*no business* rewriting the contents of the package and could simply copy
the file itself.  If it does the rewrite, as it is doing now, it opens up
the transcription to all sorts of errors, the above being one.  Not only is
the approach slow, and error prone, it is unnecessary.  The file could be
copied quite simply.

Is this easy to fix?  I think it's a really bad design flaw.

_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
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