Hi Dave,

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 10:24 AM David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
>
> OK, it should be back now, and hopefully the mail delivery will be working again.
>
> I don't know the details, but it looks like the startup script is looking for
> a file called "patch.st" to load. Chris had previously told me to rename that
> file to "patch.st.old", which I had done. But today I wanted to undo my
> earlier changes, and I renamed patch.st.old to patch.st.

"Undoing your changes" would also mean undoing the image, which I
assume you had renamed to ".old"...?

> When I manually started the run script, I got an abort error dump with
> this message at the end:
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Error: patch.st file is older than the image file.  Aborting. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> So apparently the startup script saw the patch.st was old relative to the
> image, and decided that it would be a good idea to abort (as opposed to say
> just don't load the old patch file).

The patch mechanism is there to patch a production issue until a new
image can be deployed.  Deploying a new image but keeping an old patch
file makes no sense, and no safe assumption can be made by the system
about whether the patch is needed or not needed.  The only safe thing
it can do is refuse to run and make the user aware immediately that
they're not running the configuration they thought they were
(unpatched? despite the presence of patch.st?).

Dave, I'm really sorry, but we're not done.  What's serving the
community now is a hacked together image that cannot be built from
first-principles, like before.  It's yet another "custom image" like
the one's running squeaksource.com and squeakmap.  I  can't bear to
run this way.  What needs to happen is you backport your
MCConfigurations enhancement to the Monticello version in 5.2, then
clone the SqueakMap entry for Personal SqueakSource and increment the
version number.  Then *load that into a clean 5.2 image* and deploy it
(with no patch.st).

I appreciate the new feature you want to bring to MC Configurations,
truly, but it's more important to me for this production system to
retain the process maturity it had before.

 - Chris



 - Chris