Hi Jakob,

smalltalkHub had also been offline for the past three days or so, see this thread on the Pharo mailing list: http://forum.world.st/smalltalkhub-down-td5119524.html

My vision for the Squeak/Metacello installation process is as follows (note that I haven't discussed this with anyone else yet, so there may be some false assumptions):
- The Metacello on Github gets a new CI task that, after a successful build for all Squeak platforms, produces a single MCZ that bundles the current Metacello from master
- MetacelloStub downloads the most recent MCZ for Metacello master and installs it
- A postInstall script configures the Github Metacello repository and registers it in the system, but does not download anything, since we already have the most up-to-date version of Metacello installed. This is just to provide the same impression as if we had gone out and downloaded it again.

This would have several advantages:
- no more bootstrapping in-image: the bootstrapping will essentially be moved to the CI to happen only once for everyone
- through this, we get a massively improved installation time (I assume): downloading an MCZ and installing it should be considerably faster than the various installation steps that we currently have to go through to get the most recent Metacello version
- only one source of truth: we no longer have different versions of Metacello on smalltalkHub/Gemsource, but only the one on Github. This would have prevented the short outage we had a couple weeks back where the bootstrap-Metacello version was not able to read some repositories as the format had changed since then


Concerning Squeak-trunk 32bit builds, I just tried to run one locally headful, and a failure occurs in primitiveSSLCreate, leading to a notification about ensuring to have internet and then a quiet image (see Installer>>ensureRecentMetacello, `self inform: ...`). I suppose we could consider changing this to an error instead, such that the CI build would fail rather than happily wait for ever after for you to click on the Okay button of the info window. Or, even better, create an Exception subclass for it that smalltalkCI can catch and handle appropriately, while by default the user sees the same info window.

Best,
Tom
________________________________________
From: Jakob Reschke <forums.jakob at resfarm.de>
Sent: Monday, July 13, 2020 7:28:01 PM
To: Tobias Pape
Cc: The general-purpose Squeak developers list; Beckmann, Tom; Henrichs, Dale (Gemtalksystems); Niephaus, Fabio
Subject: Re: Metacello bootstrap fails due to download timeouts

Maybe, but it did not even get to the steps that involve GitHub as far
as I can tell. Also the 32 bit trunk builds already failed before
today.

Am Mo., 13. Juli 2020 um 19:23 Uhr schrieb Tobias Pape <Das.Linux at gmx.de>:
>
>
> > On 13.07.2020, at 19:22, Jakob Reschke <forums.jakob at resfarm.de> wrote:
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > My Travis CI builds for Squeak-Trunk 32 bits (and only these) started to
> > fail due to timeouts. When I looked at it in a Linux VM and it fails
> > to download Metacello-Base-dkh.109.mcz from SmalltalkHub. When I try
> > to access this version with a web browser, I get an error HTTP 500
> > VoMongoConnectionError
> > http://smalltalkhub.com/mc/dkh/metacello/main/Metacello-Base-dkh.109.mcz
>
>
> Github was down today.
> -t
>
> >
> > A fresh 64 bit Trunk image from squeak.org when run on Windows instead
> > hangs when
> > downloading Metacello-Core-dkh.494.mcz when I do `Metacello new`.
> > Eventually it erred with "Error: retry with alternate repository
> > failed: 'ConnectionTimedOut: Data receive timed out.'" ...after about
> > half an hour or so. The error comes from
> > ConfigurationOfMetacello>>ensureMetacello:. Though it does look as if
> > it first tried with a repository at
> > http://seaside.gemtalksystems.com/ss/metacello and not SmalltalkHub. I
> > can download the version in a web browser without a problem:
> > http://seaside.gemtalksystems.com/ss/metacello/Metacello-Core-dkh.494.mcz
> >
> > Yet a local 64 bit trunk smalltalkCI build succeeded and I don't know
> > why yet. It also needs to go through the MetacelloStub, doesn't it?
> >
> > For a start, does anyone experience the same problem or is it my bad
> > luck with the connections? To test, print `Metacello new` in a fresh image
> > which does not have the Metacello class yet.
> >
> > Now SmalltalkHub is deprecated as you can read on its
> > front page. http://smalltalkhub.com/
> >
> > Tom, Tobias, Dale, you already started to discuss changing the
> > bootstrap of current Metacello in Squeak when the Tonel changes were
> > integrated, didn't you? Is there a path where we can live without any
> > unmaintained repositories like the ones on SmalltalkHub?
> >
> > On a different level: shouldn't the bootstrapping of the
> > MetacelloStub, or rather the downloading of version signal an error
> > with a timeout sooner when it cannot retrieve a
> > version, instead of waiting or retrying for a long time?
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Jakob
> >
>
>