[Vm-dev] building on a mac

[tim Rowledge]

> On 15-12-2015, at 5:49 PM, Ben Coman <btc at openinworld.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 9:31 AM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On 15-12-2015, at 5:27 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Robert,
>>> 
>>>    first what's the rationale for building them internally?  The current SSL plugins are external and there are advantages to them being external.
>> 
>> Just in case there is any idea that it would make the system ‘more secure’ remember that an external plugin of the appropriate name is supposed to over-ride any internal one; this was originally designed to allow replacing a faulty plugin without having to replace the entire VM.
> 
> I'm curious where replacing just a faulty plugin rather than the full
> VM would be a practical advantage?  Can this be done without shutting
> down the image (in which case I can see one for a high availability
> control system).

Yup, in general (subject to the design of the code using it) this is the case. You can unload a plugin with (IIRC!) Smalltalk unloadModule: name
Andreas & I used to use this a great deal when originally developing the plugin concept, and it’s very useful during the new plugin process. No need to keep quitting the image/vm and so on.

> I guess you would need to be careful to checkout the same version VM
> code as the starting point of a fix.

There’s a fair bit of latitude; in theory a plugin quite a bit newer than the code vm should be ok.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- An early example of the Peter Principle.