[squeak-dev] worst crash yet trying to load stuff from Packages Universe in 3.10.2....

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

OK, one more try I thought.....

I took a fresh 3.10.2-7179 image, set my preferences, opened up the
Packages Universe, carefully selected the packages I wanted, being
extra careful to avoid the ones that I've had problems with already,
and started the installs......

Things looked like they had finished fine, and so I tried clicking on
the Packages Universe window again to see what it might say and
KABOOM! (this all retyped by hand)

***System error handling failed***
Original error: MessageNotUnderstood: LabelMorph class>>contents:.
Debugger error: MessageNotUnderstood: LabelMorph class>>contensts::
[] in Debugger class>>openOn:context:label:contents:fullView: {[:ex |
self primitiveError: 'Original error: ', title asString, ', Debuge...]}
BlockContext>>valueWithPossibleArgs:
[] in MethodContext(ContextPart)>>handleSignal: {[(self tempAt: 2)
valueWithPossibleArgs: {exception}]}
blockContext>>ensure:
MethodContext(ContextPart)>>handleSignal:
MessageNotUnderstood(Exception)>>signal
LabelMorph class(Object)>>doesNotUnderstand: #contents:
UIThemeSoftSqueak(UITheme)>>buttonLabelForText:
UIThemeSoftSqueak>>buttonLabelForText:
UIThemeSoftSqueak(UITheme)>>buttonLabelFor:
PluggableButtonMorph>>newLabel
PluggableButtonMorph>>label:
[] in Debugger>>buttonRowForPreDebugWindow: {[:quad | aButton :=
PluggableButtonMorph on: aDebugWindow getState:...]}
OrderedCollection>>do:
Debugger>>buttonRowForPreDebugWindow:
Debugger>>buildMorphicNotifierLabelled:message:
Debugger>>openNotifierContents:label:
[] in Debugger class>>openOn:context:label:contents:fullView:
{[debugger := self new process: process controller: controller co...]}
BlockContext>>on:do:
[] in Debugger class>>openOn:context:label:contents:fullView:
{[[debugger := self new process: process controller: controller co...]}
---------------------------
Type CR to enter an emergency evaluator.
Type any other character to restart.

Sadly it doesn't look like there's even any obvious hint as to what
package might have caused the problem.

I'm beginning to think this is a hopeless cause. Clearly not even a
majority of packages in the currently published universe for 3.10.2
have ever actually been tested.
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

After restarting the VM (I hit CR, then typed "exit<CR>" to the
evaluator) things seemed to start working again so I've copied the
text out of the Universe window's left-hand pane to show what things
I've installed (and so far as I can see everything is now marked as
"(installed)").

As I said, things _seemed_ to start working again. Most things
actually don't work -- I can't open any kind of browser, for example
-- I just get another very similar crash.

Sigh.

If anyone can see anything out of the "(installed)" packages that I
shouldn't have installed for any reason, please let me know and I'll
try again without whatever and see what happens.



Code Browsing
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WarpSketchMorph version 1.12
Network
Celeste version 1.25
Celeste version 2.21
DNS Client version 1.0
DNS Client version 1.1
ExternalWebBrowser version 8
ExternalWebBrowser version 9
Folktale version 0.51
HTML-Parser version 1.5
HTML-Parser version 1.5-2
HTTPClient version 19
IRCBot version 2.1
IRCe version 10.7.6-2
KomHttpServer version 6.2
KomHttpServer version 7.0.4
KomHttpServer version 7.0.30
KomServices version 1.0
KomServices version 1.1.2
KomServices version 1.12
PWS version 0.2gt1
REPLServer version 16
RFB-VNC version 1.0
RemoteFrameBuffer version 34
SoapCore version 1.0b
Swazoo version 2.0
Swazoo version 2.1
Swazoo-HTTP version 7
Telnet version 301
Office
Diagram Browser version 2004-7-25
MiniToDo version 1.0
MiniToDo version 1.1
OpenOffice Importer version 16
OpenOffice Importer version 17
X11Fonts version 1
Persistence
BTree version 28
BTree version 49
GOODS version 71
GOODS version 80
Glorp version 0.4.129
Glorp version 0.4.169
Java Serialization version 1.61
Java Serialization version 1.71
Magma 1.0 client version r40
Magma 1.0 server version r40
Magma 1.0 server version r41
Magma 1.41 version r41.1
Magma Client version 0.9beta
Magma Seaside version 0.9beta
Magma Seaside-alpha version 0.9.83
Magma Seaside-alpha version 0.9.84
Magma Seaside-alpha version 1.0.86
Magma Server version 0.9beta
Magma seasideHelper version 2.8.r40
Magma seasideHelper version 2.8.r40.32
Magma sunit version 1.0.6
Magma sunit version 1.0.8
MinneStore version 2.8
Mysql Driver version 1.13
NetStrings version 1.0
ODBC version 1
ODBC version 2
PostgreSQL Client version 0.9.2
(installed) PostgreSQL Client version 1.0
ROE version 42
SIXX version 0.1h
SIXX version 0.3
SIXX version 0.55
SIXX version 0.74
SIXX version 0.82
SIXX version 0.83
(installed) SIXX version 0.95
SPL PDF Library version 1.0-21a
SandstoneDb version 113
SqueakDBX version 0.7
SqueakDBX version 0.7.1
(installed) YAXO version 9
Simulation
Manzana version 2003-1-21
(installed) SmallDEVS version 2006-12-6
Squeak Distributions
Squeak-dev image version 0.96
Squeak-dev image version 0.97
Squeak-dev image version 0.98
Squeak-dev image version 0.105
Squeak-dev image version 0.106
Squeak-dev image version 0.107
Squeak-dev image version 0.108
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Squeak-dev image version 0.115
Squeak-dev image version 0.116
Squeak-dev image version 0.117
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Squeak-dev image version 0.120
Squeak-dev image version 0.123
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Squeak-dev image version 0.128
Squeak-dev image version 0.129
Squeak-dev image version 0.130
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Squeak-dev image version 0.140
Squeak-dev image version 0.143
Squeak-dev image version 0.144
Squeak-dev image version 0.148
Squeak-dev image version 0.151
Squeak-dev image version 0.154
Squeak-dev image version 0.155
Squeak-dev image version 0.156
Squeak-dev image version 0.158
Squeak-dev image version 0.159
Squeak-dev image version 0.160
Squeak-dev image version 0.161
Squeak-dev image version 0.162
Squeak-dev image version 0.163
Squeak-dev image version 0.164
Squeak-dev image version 0.165
Squeak-dev image version 0.167
System
CommandShell version 3.0.5
CommandShell version 4.2.2
CommandShell version 4.2.3
CommandShell version 4.3
Cryptography Team Package version 1.1
Exupery version 0.4
Exupery version 0.10
Exupery version 0.11
Exupery version 0.12
Exupery version 0.12new
Exupery version 0.13
Exupery version 0.14
Exupery Development version 0.12
Exupery Development version 0.12r2
Exupery Development version 0.14
Exupery Development version 0.14.1
Exupery Development version 0.14.2
Exupery Development version 0.14.3
FFI version 3.9
FFI version 3.9.1
FFI-Examples version 3.9
FFI-Tests version 3.9
Namespaces version 46
NewCompiler version 117
OSProcess version V4-3-6
OSProcess version V4-3-7
OSProcessIO version 0.1
OSProcessIO version 0.2
OSProcessIO version 0.3
OSProcessPlugin version 4.2.6a
OSProcessPlugin version 4.2.7a.1
ProcessSpecific version 1.0.11
ProcessSpecific version 1.0.15
SSH version 1.0
SSL version 1.0
SqueakElib version 1
VMMaker version 3.7b5
VMMaker version 3.8b6
VMMaker version 3.8b6.1
Tools
NamespaceTools version 36
PlusTools version 37.3
ToolBuilder-Examples version 4
ToolBuilder-Kernel version 20
ToolBuilder-Kernel version 26
ToolBuilder-Kernel version 27
ToolBuilder-MVC version 12
ToolBuilder-MVC version 14
ToolBuilder-Morphic version 22
ToolBuilder-Morphic version 27
ToolBuilder-Specs version 1
ToolBuilder-Tweak version 23
Uncategorized
Cryptography version 0.3
FreeType Plus-plugins source version 0
IRCe version 10.7.6
Mondrian version 0.33
Mondrian version 0.40
Morse Code version 2
Network-HTML version 4
OSProcessPlugin version 4.2.6
ProjectsAsPNG version 1.0
Refactoring Tests version 2
SUnitProgress version 0.2
ScriptManager version 0.4
ShoutWorkspace version 1-tween.1
ShoutWorkspace version 1-tween.2
ShoutWorkspace version 1-tween.3
ShoutWorkspace version 1-tween.4
Speech version 9
Techo-Base version 1
TimeZoneDatabase version 1.2.5
VersionNumber version 1.0
Video and Image Processing version 2.1
User Interface
(installed) Diff Tools version 0.51
(installed) Event Enhancements version 0.6
Genie version r67
(installed) Geometry Models version 0.3
Polymorph EventEnhancements version 1.0
Polymorph EventEnhancements version 1.1
Polymorph Geometry version 1.0
Polymorph TaskbarIcons version 1.0
Polymorph ToolBuilder version 1.0
Polymorph ToolBuilder version 1.1
Polymorph Tools Diff version 1.0
Polymorph Tools Diff version 1.1
Polymorph Widgets version 1.0
Polymorph Widgets version 1.1
ToolBuilder integration for UI Themes version 0.51
ToolBuilder integration for UI Themes version 0.52
UI Theme Taskbar Icons version 0.1
UI Themes and Standard Widgets version 0.5
UI Themes and Standard Widgets version 0.53
UI Themes and Standard Widgets version 0.54
UI Themes and Standard Widgets version 0.55
UI Themes and Standard Widgets version 0.56
UI Themes and Standard Widgets version 0.57
UI Themes and Standard Widgets version 0.58
UI Themes and Standard Widgets version 0.59
UI Themes and Standard Widgets version 0.60
UI Themes and Standard Widgets version 0.70
(installed) UI Themes and Standard Widgets version 0.80
Web Development
Aida version 5.4
Aida version 5.6
Comet version 2.8.3.28
Magritte-Seaside version 1.0.17.278
Pier version current
Pier-Blog version 1.0.17.90
Pier-Commands-RemoveChildren version 1.0.14
Pier-Commands-RemoveChildren version 1.0.14.2
Pier-Design version 1.0.17.5
Pier-Documents version 1.0.17.7
Pier-EditorEnh version 1.0.17.16
Pier-Google version 1.0.17.5
Pier-Jetsam-Environment version 1.0.16.5
Pier-Jetsam-Environment version 1.0.16.7
Pier-LightBox version 1.0.17.6
Pier-Magma version 1.38
Pier-Magma-beta version 1.0.9-alpha.35
Pier-Math version 1.0.17.6
Pier-Media version 1.0.17.1
Pier-Randomizer version 1.0.17.4
Pier-Seaside version 1.0.17.311
Pier-Security version 1.0.17.113
Pier-Setup version 1.0.17.30
Pier-Shout version 1.0.17.8
Pier-Sitemap version 1.0.17.20
Pier-TabbedPagesWidgets version 1.0.14.5
Pier-TagCloud version 1.0.17.11
Pier-Titles version 1.0.17.1
PlotKit version 0.9.1.26
PlotKit version 0.9.1.27
RSRSS2 version 2.8.3.11
Scriptaculous version 2.8.3.242
Seaside version 2.8.3.572
Seaside-PlotKit-beta version 0.9.1.26
Seaside28Jetsam version 2.8.526
Seaside28Jetsam version 2.8.529
Seaside28Jetsam version 2.8.536
Seaside28Jetsam version 2.8.545
Seaside28Jetsam-Blueprint version 0.7.1
Seaside28Jetsam-Supersleight version 0.1
Seaside28Jetsam-Useful-CSS version 0.1
ShoreComponents version 3.10
Squeak web packages version 0.1
Squeak web packages version 0.2
TinyWiki version 1.0.1
Web Development beta
Sandcastle version 0
Sandcastle version 1.0
Seaside-Adapters-Core version pmm.2.mcz
Seaside-Adapters-Swazoo version pmm.7.mcz-2
Seaside-Adapters-Swazoo version 8
Seaside-Adapters-Swazoo version 9
Seaside-HTML5-beta version 2.8.411.5
Seaside-Squeak-Adapters version pmm.3.mcz
Seaside28Jetsam version 2.8.415
Seaside28Jetsam version 2.8.425
SeasideAdaptersCompatibility version pmm.1.mcz
ShoreComponents-beta version 3.10
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>



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[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Somehow I managed to get a change sorter window to open too, and
here's the list of change sets (there are no changes in "New Changes"):

OBUniverse-Dan Corneanu.38
OB-Regex-lr.9
OB-Enhancements-dr.265
OB-Refactory-lr.113
Monticello2OB-dc.17
OB-Morphic-dr.63
SmallDEVS-Examples-vj.21
SmallDEVS-GUI-ke.51
SmallDEVS-Core-vj.77
SmallDEVS-MyRepository-vj.61
System-Prototypes.7.cs
PlotMorph3-dgd.cs
Number_class-readFrom.st
OB-Standard-dr.377
Refactoring-Core-lr.11
Pinesoft-Tools-Diff-gvc.8
MC2-Squeak-dc.62
SUnitGUI-kph.50
Sake-Packages-kph.8
Universes-dc.50
SIXX-mu.95
XML-Parser-mir.91
Numerics-rdt.29
FixedDecimal-cbc.13
XML-Parser-mir.9
OmniBrowser-dr.432
AST-lr.160
VB-Regex-sd.9
BitArray1
Null-kph.14
PostgresV2-yj.5
NsTileGame-sbw.17
Morphic-Games-asm.1
Games-Sokoban-sbw.9
Sake-Core-kph.82
Pinesoft-Widgets-gvc.324
Array2D-md.1
Pinesoft-EventEnhancements-gvc.3
Monticello2-dc.194
Sport-2.031
NsTileGame-sbw.19
Units-md.4
ConnectorsBasicDistro-nk.12
ConnectorsDemo-nk.5
BroomMorphs-Connectors-nk.2
BroomMorphs-Base-nk.2
ConnectorsGraphLayout-nk.7
ConnectorsTools-nk.21
ConnectorsShapes-nk.29
ConnectorsText-nk.16
Connectors-nk.187
FSM-nk.42
CGPrereqs-nk.8
ConnectorsFor3.8-187.sar
Pinesoft-Geometry-gvc.3
SARBuilder.st
BreakOut-sd.5
SUnit-kph.117
7179AdvanceTo3dot10dot2
7178MorphicCandidatesForGoCleanup-M7076-klc
7177ReleaseTests-M7076-wiz
7176AdvanceTo3dot10dot2beta
New Changes
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Ralph Johnson]

Here are at least two things you are doing wrong. It looks like you
are trying to load many versions of the same package. Only lead ONE
version of each package. Almost always, load the most recent one. In
my opinion, all the old versions of packages should be deleted from a
package universe.

If you are loading Squeak-dev image, you don't need to load anything
else. It has all the generally useful and reliable packages that a
developer would want. You load just one package, and you get several
dozen loaded automatically.
That is the magic of PU.

You might find that you need packages not in "Squeak-dev image", in
which case you should feel free to load them. Each package in PU is
supposed to list all packages that it depends on, so if you load a
package and don't get its prerequisite, that is bug in the package
definition.

I have found PU to be useful and reliable. On the other hand, I have
never loaded more than four or five packages at once, counting
"Squeak-dev image" and everything it requires as a single package.
When you realize that most of these packages are independently
developed and are not always tested together, you will realize that
loading 50 packages all at once is a bad idea.

On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 6:28 PM, Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
Squeak-dev image version 0.96
Squeak-dev image version 0.97
Squeak-dev image version 0.98
Squeak-dev image version 0.105
Squeak-dev image version 0.106
Squeak-dev image version 0.107
Squeak-dev image version 0.108
Squeak-dev image version 0.114
Squeak-dev image version 0.115
Squeak-dev image version 0.116
Squeak-dev image version 0.117
Squeak-dev image version 0.118
Squeak-dev image version 0.120
Squeak-dev image version 0.123
Squeak-dev image version 0.125
Squeak-dev image version 0.126
Squeak-dev image version 0.128
Squeak-dev image version 0.129
Squeak-dev image version 0.130
Squeak-dev image version 0.133
Squeak-dev image version 0.134
Squeak-dev image version 0.137
Squeak-dev image version 0.140
Squeak-dev image version 0.143
Squeak-dev image version 0.144
Squeak-dev image version 0.148
Squeak-dev image version 0.151
Squeak-dev image version 0.154
Squeak-dev image version 0.155
Squeak-dev image version 0.156
Squeak-dev image version 0.158
Squeak-dev image version 0.159
Squeak-dev image version 0.160
Squeak-dev image version 0.161
Squeak-dev image version 0.162
Squeak-dev image version 0.163
Squeak-dev image version 0.164
Squeak-dev image version 0.165
Squeak-dev image version 0.167

[Jerome Peace]

[squeak-dev] worst crash yet trying to load stuff from Packages Universe in 3.10.2....

Hi Greg,

I like your spirit of adventure.
My bug finding/creating assistant Puck thinks you do good work. :)

Sure you wouldn't like to become a mantis reporter?


***

Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc. woods at planix.ca
Mon Dec 15 00:13:37 UTC 2008
OK, one more try I thought.....
I took a fresh 3.10.2-7179 image, set my preferences, opened up the
Packages Universe, carefully selected the packages I wanted, being
extra careful to avoid the ones that I've had problems with already,
and started the installs......
Things looked like they had finished fine, and so I tried clicking on
the Packages Universe window again to see what it might say and
KABOOM! (this all retyped by hand)
***System error handling failed***
Original error: MessageNotUnderstood: LabelMorph class>>contents:.
[] in Debugger class>>openOn:context:label:contents:fullView: {[:ex |
self primitiveError: 'Original error: ', title asString, ', Debuge...]}
[] in MethodContext(ContextPart)>>handleSignal: {[(self tempAt: 2)
valueWithPossibleArgs: {exception}]}
MessageNotUnderstood(Exception)>>signal

Ok. From the evidence so far.
You have gotten to the emergency evaluator
because the debugger blew up on whatever was the original error.

The debugger blew up probably because of a misdirected message.
People tend to put in:
answer
when they meant:
^ answer.
In this case something in the Pinesoft ui enhancements
looks like it left one out in a LabelMorph class message.
Instead of answering an instance it returned the class itself
which had no idea what to do with an message to its instance.

Congratulations you found a bug.

Puck would like to know exactly how to recreate this failure.
(So he can try it out on some of his "friends" :).

My curiosity would like to know why you are so ambitious as to load so much.
And I sympathize with you wanting it all to work right away. Out of the box.

What you may be slowly realizing is that all this is Beta software at best.
Test coverage in squeak is a recent thought.
Most of the software is released with prayers for its survival.
First time heavy users find the integration bugs.
That would be you.
Oldtimers, by instinct born of experience, tend to treat squeak tenderly.
As if they are walking on eggs that might break at any instant
and give off a rotten stentch.

A sad state of affairs to be sure,
but the alternative would be a lot of unpaid work.
And the person who would take that on
would have to have a powerful personal reason for doing so.

So far in this small community no one has shown up with that need.
Still you never know.

Leaving aside the who. Do you or anyone else out there
have an idea of how that testing could be done?

Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Post by Jerome Peace
Sure you wouldn't like to become a mantis reporter?

If I can send an e-mail that will create and/or append to a report,
then sure!

Post by Jerome Peace
Puck would like to know exactly how to recreate this failure.
(So he can try it out on some of his "friends" :).

Looks like all I had to do was try to load SmallDEVS from the default
package universe.

Post by Jerome Peace
My curiosity would like to know why you are so ambitious as to load so much.

I want to start with everything I want, either functionality or as
reference classes.

Partly I want to start this way because I have VERY quickly learned
that I can accidentally break an image just by trying to file
something in that someone else has published, even if it has
supposedly been "blessed" in some way by being included in the default
package universe for the release I'm using. I'm not quite so
disciplined that I will remember to be very careful with image copies
later on so I'm trying to create a stable baseline image with
everything I think I'll want for now.

Post by Jerome Peace
And I sympathize with you wanting it all to work right away. Out of the box.

To quote from <URL:http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5918>:

"The Stable 3.10 universe is a package universe for Squeak 3.10, akin
to the ones done for 3.7 and 3.9. It includes 214 optional packages
that have all been verified to at least load into Squeak 3.10."


I don't exactly know if what it refers to is the same thing that I get
when I press the "Package Universe" button on the initial World in the
3.10.2 release image I'm using, but I've now proven at least three or
more of the packages from the default PU for 3.10.2 won't even file in
cleanly, and I'm just picking from what I would consider to be a
_very_ conservative list of things I'm interested in.

Post by Jerome Peace
What you may be slowly realizing is that all this is Beta software at best.

"beta"? 3.10.2 isn't even a ".0" release (though it is an even
number...)

Perhaps I'm confusing a nice big button everyone says to press if I
want stuff back that was taken out of old-time Squeak releases with a
part of the actual release, but then again there's that claim above
I'm quoting.

Post by Jerome Peace
Test coverage in squeak is a recent thought.

Perhaps, but I didn't have anywhere near this much trouble with 2.8 or
3.0. Squeak's QA has completely disintegrated, at least if you
consider the default PU button to be a part of Squeak.

Post by Jerome Peace
Most of the software is released with prayers for its survival.

From what I've seen of PU, and it's apparent thousands of steps
backwards from the 3.0 days, I'm not even sure I see any evidence of
such prayers being made for it!

Post by Jerome Peace
First time heavy users find the integration bugs.
That would be you.

Hah! If I'm a "heavy user" then I can't imagine how you would
describe someone who really wants to dive into Squeak and do something
major. I'm still just learning here. I'm not even interested in
doing any of the really fancy database, web, or image maker stuff.

Post by Jerome Peace
Oldtimers, by instinct born of experience, tend to treat squeak tenderly.
As if they are walking on eggs that might break at any instant
and give off a rotten stentch.

Having played with 2.8 and 3.0 in days gone by I'd have to say that a
great deal of this stench is quite recent.
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Andreas Raab]

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Jerome Peace
Puck would like to know exactly how to recreate this failure.
(So he can try it out on some of his "friends" :).

Looks like all I had to do was try to load SmallDEVS from the default
package universe.

No surprise. Polymorph as a class called LabelMorph. SmallDEVS has a
class called LabelMorph. They don't agree. So much for not having name
spaces.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Jerome Peace
Test coverage in squeak is a recent thought.

Perhaps, but I didn't have anywhere near this much trouble with 2.8 or
3.0. Squeak's QA has completely disintegrated, at least if you consider
the default PU button to be a part of Squeak.

Well, that's both true and not. A thing to keep in mind here is there
wasn't even remotely as much stuff available at your fingertips in those
days. SqueakMap did not exist in 2.8, neither did Universes. There were
a few better known projects that you could easily find, everything else
was basically inaccessible. And with variety come all the packaging and
scaling problems that were never addressed in Squeak.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Jerome Peace
First time heavy users find the integration bugs.
That would be you.

Hah! If I'm a "heavy user" then I can't imagine how you would describe
someone who really wants to dive into Squeak and do something major.
I'm still just learning here. I'm not even interested in doing any of
the really fancy database, web, or image maker stuff.

There are misunderstandings on both ends here. As a first-time user you
naturally expect those things to "just work" so calling you a "heavy
user" is not a good characterization for what you're doing. I would call
this "exploratory loading" of packages which is probably the worst kind
for integrators to deal with unless they have automated tools for
detecting those package conflicts.

As for doing something major: The first thing you leave at home is the
idea of loading random untested code from the net and expect it to work
in your project. You start with a nice stable base image that you expect
to use for several years and build on top of that.

When you need something, you look at the options, see if one suits your
task, review the code to see whether it's good enough to reuse or
whether you're better off rewriting it from scratch, and then you port
it into your environment. I've done this many times and if you start
with the expectation that you *will* have to actually port this into
your environment you know that this will be a sizable investment but
that at the end of the process you have something that works and that
you can support over time.

I have done this many times. It works quite well if you are realistic
about the investment you are making.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Jerome Peace
Oldtimers, by instinct born of experience, tend to treat squeak tenderly.
As if they are walking on eggs that might break at any instant
and give off a rotten stentch.

Having played with 2.8 and 3.0 in days gone by I'd have to say that a
great deal of this stench is quite recent.

I think yours is a bit of a case of selective memory ;-) I've been
playing in those days too and I do not recall even five projects that
one could easily find on the net.

While I agree that there is some completely needless recent breakage
that makes things significantly worse than they have to be, I would say
that the majority of the problems you are seeing are the result of
having more options available at your fingertips.

And the best way I can think about addressing them would be by having
automated tests which can be run all the time and which test which
packages load together and which ones fail. This information could then
be used to inform the user about the conflict and avoid random crashes.

Cheers,
- Andreas

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Post by Andreas Raab
There are misunderstandings on both ends here. As a first-time user
you naturally expect those things to "just work" so calling you a
"heavy user" is not a good characterization for what you're doing. I
would call this "exploratory loading" of packages which is probably
the worst kind for integrators to deal with unless they have
automated tools for detecting those package conflicts.

Indeed, I do fully expect everything in the default "release" version
of the Package Universe to actually work with the release it is
intended to work with.

The kinds of conflicts I've found are _TRIVIAL_ to find. Just LOAD
EVERYTHING. If you can't then something MUST be kicked out of the
PU. Someone can fix the conflict later if they want the official
"release" PU to include that something.

This level of QA testing for PU is trivial -- there's no valid excuse
for not doing it. It doesn't even have to be automated -- just select
everything and hit the install button. If it blows up then the PU is
broken and useless and you go back a step and decide whether the thing
causing the conflict is worth the effort of fixing, or whether the
thing it might be conflicting with is really a higher priority to
include or not. The next level of running all available unit tests
should also be trivial and required for release PUs.

I would expect what you say to be true of SqueakMap, even a SqueakMap
with proper dependency tracking and conflict management. SqueakMap
does claim to be a one-size one-stop shop for everything after all.
However I really do not expect the same problems of official "release"
Package Universes, especially when the button is there in the default
official release and everyone is told to push it and every official
looking bit of documentation says it's been tested successfully to
work with the intended release.
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Keith Hodges]

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
The kinds of conflicts I've found are _TRIVIAL_ to find. Just LOAD
EVERYTHING. If you can't then something MUST be kicked out of the
PU. Someone can fix the conflict later if they want the official
"release" PU to include that something.

Unfortunately that's an unrealistic test for Package Universes.

There are sometimes two versions of the same or similar item, e.g 3
different Magma installations.
Sometimes more than two versions of the same thing are present for
various reasons.
And finally you cant load 3 different Monticello's with Monticello.

Keith

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Post by Keith Hodges

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
The kinds of conflicts I've found are _TRIVIAL_ to find. Just LOAD
EVERYTHING. If you can't then something MUST be kicked out of the
PU. Someone can fix the conflict later if they want the official
"release" PU to include that something.

Unfortunately that's an unrealistic test for Package Universes.

Hopefully you mean this only in the context of what you say below.

Post by Keith Hodges
There are sometimes two versions of the same or similar item, e.g 3
different Magma installations.
Sometimes more than two versions of the same thing are present for
various reasons.
And finally you cant load 3 different Monticello's with Monticello.

Well as I read the design goals for PU, there were not supposed to be
multiple versions of things in a given PU now where there. Indeed
various comments in the archives about the failure to meet this goal.

Practically though what I really meant was obviously to select just
the most recent version of everything. That's time consuming with the
current interface, especially with the pollution of so many deprecated
versions of most packages, but not incredibly that hard to do, and I'm
sure someone who knows the PU implementation could automate it in
nearly a heartbeat.

I'm absolutely stunned that this most basic test has not been done as
the minimal go/no-go test for every official "release" PU. Given the
emphasis in the community on unit tests it's stunning that they are
also not a go/no-go requirement for any official release too (image &
PU, of course).

The tools are there! Why aren't they being used?
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Andreas Raab]

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
This level of QA testing for PU is trivial -- there's no valid excuse
for not doing it.

In a volunteer community, yes there absolutely is. The valid excuse is
"lack of resources" and it can only be fixed by someone (that means you)
actually putting in the time and effort of doing it. How about it? You
could start loading all the packages in order and see what the first one
is that breaks? That'd be a start.

Cheers,
- Andreas

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Andreas Raab
There are misunderstandings on both ends here. As a first-time user
you naturally expect those things to "just work" so calling you a
"heavy user" is not a good characterization for what you're doing. I
would call this "exploratory loading" of packages which is probably
the worst kind for integrators to deal with unless they have automated
tools for detecting those package conflicts.

Indeed, I do fully expect everything in the default "release" version of
the Package Universe to actually work with the release it is intended to
work with.
The kinds of conflicts I've found are _TRIVIAL_ to find. Just LOAD
EVERYTHING. If you can't then something MUST be kicked out of the PU.
Someone can fix the conflict later if they want the official "release"
PU to include that something.
This level of QA testing for PU is trivial -- there's no valid excuse
for not doing it. It doesn't even have to be automated -- just select
everything and hit the install button. If it blows up then the PU is
broken and useless and you go back a step and decide whether the thing
causing the conflict is worth the effort of fixing, or whether the thing
it might be conflicting with is really a higher priority to include or
not. The next level of running all available unit tests should also be
trivial and required for release PUs.
I would expect what you say to be true of SqueakMap, even a SqueakMap
with proper dependency tracking and conflict management. SqueakMap does
claim to be a one-size one-stop shop for everything after all. However
I really do not expect the same problems of official "release" Package
Universes, especially when the button is there in the default official
release and everyone is told to push it and every official looking bit
of documentation says it's been tested successfully to work with the
intended release.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
This level of QA testing for PU is trivial -- there's no valid

excuse

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
for not doing it.

In a volunteer community, yes there absolutely is. The valid excuse
is "lack of resources" and it can only be fixed by someone (that
means you) actually putting in the time and effort of doing it. How
about it? You could start loading all the packages in order and see
what the first one is that breaks? That'd be a start.

Sorry, no that is _not_ a valid excuse.

Someone made the official 3.10 PU. Someone even made the claim that
everything in it had been tested to load (without even adding the
qualifier "on its own"). Sadly they did not also do the obvious thing
of trying to load the most recent version of everything in that PU.
It is a simple, obvious, and easy test to do and would clearly have
avoided all the troubles I have encountered. Running all unit tests
is two or three clicks more.

Were I the person responsible for publishing that official PU I would
never have done it in the first place if I couldn't have managed to
take the time to do the basic QA testing I'm suggesting should have
been done. Don't start something you can't finish and sure as heck
don't publish a half-finished mess and make outrageous claims about it!

I think the real problem here isn't the lack of QA testing. The real
problem is the attitude of how things apparently got selected to be
included in the official release PU. It (for 3.10) has ended up being
effectively just a much less usable collection of what seems to be a
vast majority of what's also in SqueakMap, and with the only advantage
in that it automatically selects known dependencies and sorts the
installs topologically. Maybe this is useful enough for experts who
know everything about what they know they want, but it sure as heck
isn't something for anyone even at my level, let alone any true
beginner.

The FunSqueak image might be better for beginners, but it has similar
breakage as Pharo -- stuff might be loaded, but it still doesn't
work. Running all SUnit tests in FunSqueak shows even more breakage
everywhere in the image -- doing so actually core-dumps the VM on OSX
not far into the over 7000 tests.

In an ideal world something like FunSqueak should be the product of a
full load of everything in the official "release" PU, and it should be
something in which all the SUnit tests run green after the load.

At least the 3.10.2-final-7179 image does pass most of the 2254 tests
it includes (I get 2 failures on OSX)
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Keith Hodges]

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Andreas Raab

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
This level of QA testing for PU is trivial -- there's no valid excuse
for not doing it.

In a volunteer community, yes there absolutely is. The valid excuse
is "lack of resources" and it can only be fixed by someone (that
means you) actually putting in the time and effort of doing it. How
about it? You could start loading all the packages in order and see
what the first one is that breaks? That'd be a start.

Sorry, no that is _not_ a valid excuse.
Someone made the official 3.10 PU.

Are you actually using the 3.10 PU? Or the 'development' universe.

Open universe editor to find out.

Keith

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Post by Keith Hodges
Are you actually using the 3.10 PU? Or the 'development' universe.
Open universe editor to find out.

Hah! First I've heard of that thing!

It says "Developement" in the top field.

If that's not right then I'd say the official image is broken.

How do I change it to whatever it should be for the official 3.10
release? I.e. what do I type or paste into that field to replace the
word "Development"?

Is someone going to fix 3.10.3 so that it uses the right PU?
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Keith Hodges]

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Keith Hodges
Are you actually using the 3.10 PU? Or the 'development' universe.
Open universe editor to find out.

Hah! First I've heard of that thing!
It says "Developement" in the top field.
If that's not right then I'd say the official image is broken.
How do I change it to whatever it should be for the official 3.10
release? I.e. what do I type or paste into that field to replace the
word "Development"?
Is someone going to fix 3.10.3 so that it uses the right PU?

No, please don't.

Development is the universe that is currently being updated with the
latest stuff. Most things in there are tested against 3.9 and 3.10,
since thats what developers are using, so it is the most maintained.

Since 3.10 is the current released image then it is in the Development
Universes that package load dependencies stands the best chance of being
fixed.

This is what is called a compromise, and we know what needs to be done,
and that is being done, just not in 3.10

Keith

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Post by Keith Hodges

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
How do I change it to whatever it should be for the official 3.10
release? I.e. what do I type or paste into that field to replace the
word "Development"?

So, I still don't know how to get to a proper "release" version of the
PU to open when I press the "Package Universe Browser" button....

Post by Keith Hodges

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
Is someone going to fix 3.10.3 so that it uses the right PU?

No, please don't.
Development is the universe that is currently being updated with the
latest stuff. Most things in there are tested against 3.9 and 3.10,
since thats what developers are using, so it is the most maintained.

Sorry, but that's just not reflective of the facts at the moment.

The "Development" PU is stinky peee-yooo! It's clearly not properly
tested with even a minimum of attention to conflict avoidance. It's
full of old useless garbage (i.e. tons of unnecessary old versions of
almost every package). It's got some old junk that won't even work in
any way at all on 3.10. It's a worse mess than SqueakMap because
there's no hint as to what's been actually tested against the release
being used.

It is of no real use to any beginner -- it's just a way to get people
to give up and go away.

Post by Keith Hodges
Since 3.10 is the current released image then it is in the Development
Universes that package load dependencies stands the best chance of being
fixed.
This is what is called a compromise, and we know what needs to be done,
and that is being done, just not in 3.10

So the compromise is to keep what outsiders see as the one true
official release full of untested garbage?

I'd say that's more of an outright failure instead of a compromise.

You don't put new users on the bleeding edge. That's just suicide.

If someone could tell me how to change my "Package Universe Browser"
button to open a PU browser on the official 3.10 PU so that I could
see what the official release PU should look like, and give it a go to
see if I have any better luck with it, then maybe I could have a
better opinion on whether or not it really would be better to set the
default PU back to the 3.10 official release PU or not.

If the only workable compromise really is just to try to go forward
then the best solution for helping new users in the immediate future
is to do the following:

1. remove the default "Package Universe Browser" button from the
3.10.2 and subsequent patch release/updated images.

2. tell new users (on the main squeak.org page and the downloads page
and any and all relevant Swiki pages) that they can get all the fun
stuff from some image like the FunSqueak image, but be careful to only
recommend the most stable and well tested version, not the bleeding
edge where just running the unit tests will core dump the whole VM.

3. set up an email gateway so that the "mail report" button in the
debugger actually goes somewhere where someone who can do something
about PU problems will take notice and do something to actually make
this forward progress. If I (or anyone else in my position) want to
help and I use the "mail report" button to try to help by reporting
problems I encounter, and then as a result I'm told that what I did is
useless because my report didn't go to the right place then I'm just
as likely to go away and leave you guys to your own mess.
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Keith Hodges]

Dear Greg,

some of us have spent a lot of time trying to improve things in work
that has been made available SINCE 3.10's release.

However you are basically ignoring what people are trying to tell you,
and insist on being
negative and non-constructive. So I wont be replying any further.

If you want to be constructive and help please try 3.10.2bc as mentioned
in a recent email, and contribute to the package definitions in the
Packages-Library category there.

regards

Keith

[Edgar J. De Cleene]

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
OK, one more try I thought.....
I took a fresh 3.10.2-7179 image, set my preferences, opened up the
Packages Universe, carefully selected the packages I wanted, being
extra careful to avoid the ones that I've had problems with
already, and started the installs......
Things looked like they had finished fine, and so I tried clicking
on the Packages Universe window again to see what it might say and
KABOOM! (this all retyped by hand)
***System error handling failed***
Original error: MessageNotUnderstood: LabelMorph class>>contents:.
{[:ex | self primitiveError: 'Original error: ', title asString, ',
Debuge...]}
[] in MethodContext(ContextPart)>>handleSignal: {[(self tempAt: 2)
valueWithPossibleArgs: {exception}]}
MessageNotUnderstood(Exception)>>signal
PluggableButtonMorph>>newLabel
[] in Debugger>>buttonRowForPreDebugWindow: {[:quad | aButton :=
PluggableButtonMorph on: aDebugWindow getState:...]}
{[debugger := self new process: process controller: controller co...]}
{[[debugger := self new process: process controller: controller co...]}
---------------------------
Type CR to enter an emergency evaluator.
Type any other character to restart.
Sadly it doesn't look like there's even any obvious hint as to what
package might have caused the problem.

My 5 cents of peso (less of 1 euro cent) bet is the cause is into
UITheme or the fancy enhanced look.
Look for LabelMorph, is not a class of base 3.10, for this class
responds to contents: should be subclass of StringMorph (maybe)

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
Clearly not even a majority of packages in the currently published
universe for 3.10.2 have ever actually been tested.

No, and nobody have this duty this days.

Once more the need of a Czar of Packages arise and once more I call
for nominate one and a politics for packages.

I see Jerome and you take serious on this , so why not nominate
ourselves as "US Marshalls " and fight outlaws :=)

Edgar

[Keith Hodges]

Post by Edgar J. De Cleene
No, and nobody have this duty this days.
Once more the need of a Czar of Packages arise and once more I call
for nominate one and a politics for packages.

With Sake/Packages, everyone is a czar of packages :-)

Keith

[Ralph Johnson]

Post by Keith Hodges
With Sake/Packages, everyone is a czar of packages :-)

Saying "everyone is a czar" is like saying "nobody is a czar".

This is not a packaging tool problem, and it is not a problem that can
be solved with packaging tools. Package Universe could in theory be
used to solve this problem. (Sake/Packages might be even better - I'm
not knocking it - I'm just saying it is not a tool problem.) All that
is necessary is to make sure that every combination of things in the
PU is tested.

It is relatively easy to create your own Package Universe. The
original idea for PU was that each PU would have an owner, and the
owner would make sure that everything in the PU worked together.
However, what has happened in practice is that there are only a few
PUs, one for each version of Squeak, and each PU has a lot of people
who put things in it. There is no process for making sure that
everything is tested, so some things are tested and some things are
not.

-Ralph

[Keith Hodges]

Post by Ralph Johnson

Post by Keith Hodges
With Sake/Packages, everyone is a czar of packages :-)

Saying "everyone is a czar" is like saying "nobody is a czar".

No it isnt.

If there are packages and "nobody" is has the power to edit the
definitions and the versions that are loaded then it is almost
guaranteed not to work, since no one can fix the problems.

"everyone is a czar" means that it can be a genuinely collaborative
processes, and everyone who cares is a potential tester and fixer. They
are entirely different.

I remember when some thought wiki's would never catch on.

Keith

[Casimiro de Almeida Barreto]

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[Keith Hodges]

Post by Keith Hodges

Post by Ralph Johnson

Post by Keith Hodges
With Sake/Packages, everyone is a czar of packages :-)

Saying "everyone is a czar" is like saying "nobody is a czar".

No it isnt.
If there are packages and "nobody" is has the power to edit the
definitions and the versions that are loaded then it is almost
guaranteed not to work, since no one can fix the problems.
"everyone is a czar" means that it can be a genuinely collaborative
processes, and everyone who cares is a potential tester and fixer. They
are entirely different.
I remember when some thought wiki's would never catch on.
Keith

Here I tend to agree with Ralph. Everyone can cooperate, but
cooperation must be coordinated in order to avoid confusion.

At present "one unconfused person" who knows how to get something
working is powerless to do so using Universes. Even if you wrote a
package, and someone else posted it in the Universe you are powerless to
update that entry without ownership of the entry. Having a Czar for
universes would be a step forward, at least it would stand a chance, at
the moment it is practically locked.

Sake/Packages is open to all to edit the definitions. When we have more
than two contributors to Sake/Packages then we can worry about
confusion. I dont think there will be much.

I suggested using the ***@lists.squeakfoundation.org list for
discussions about Universes and maintaining Sake/Packages etc. I don't
think we have had more than 3 posts on the subject there.

One model I enjoy (despite its many vices) is the one adopted by
fedora.org. A guy must enroll to be maintainer of a package and then,
if approved, he is in charge of receiving error notifications and
possible cooperations

So now you have a bottleneck, not just one bottleneck, but Nx
bottlenecks. Any attempt to get a combination of 10 packages working can
in worst case scenario be halted or hindered by 10 people.

The maintainers of a package do not usually test their packages in all
the possible combinations in which it is deployed. The users as a
community do.

Sake/Packages enables users to get things working, they can subclass the
published definitions and write their own. This then serves as feedback
as to what is needed to get something working in a particular context.

To be honest loading stuff is now, at last, really easy, what we need
help on now in Sake/Packages now is getting "unloading" stuff working.
Many package maintainers don't write #unload methods on their classes.

I regret I myself have never had any success with any of the linux
packaging solutions.

regards

Keith

[Edgar J. De Cleene]

Here I tend to agree with Ralph. Everyone can cooperate, but
cooperation must be coordinated in order to avoid confusion. One
model I enjoy (despite its many vices) is the one adopted by
fedora.org. A guy must enroll to be maintainer of a package and
then, if approved, he is in charge of receiving error notifications
and possible cooperations (and I notice that maintainers receive
mostly complains and few suggestions/cooperations). If no
suggestions shows up, he is in charge of correcting errors. The
maintainer may become unresponsive and there are procedures to
enroll new maintainers. Either the packages are complaint with
fedora.org dispositions (directories, nomenclatures, etc) or they
are dropped out (lack of interest in community, obsolescence, etc).
The "Fedora Committee" decides what will be in and what will be out
of the distribution/image (we can argue about how democratic is the
process but I guess we can make the process as democratic as we
want in squeak).

This is the same i saying several times.

For democratic procedure, we could add "Czar of Packages" to list of
people running for Board in 2009.

If more as one Squeaker run for this duty, who wins the election
could be nomitated for one year, same as any running and voted for
Board.

Edgar

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Post by Keith Hodges

Post by Ralph Johnson

Post by Keith Hodges
With Sake/Packages, everyone is a czar of packages :-)

Saying "everyone is a czar" is like saying "nobody is a czar".

No it isnt.

Actually literally it is. Not everyone is capable, let alone inclined
to do what you suggest.

Practically there _MUST_ be _ONE_ czar of the _official_ PU for a
given release of Squeak (just as there must be one czar for the image
content of a given release). Someone must take responsibility if
there is to be any real level of quality in the final product. The
thing called "Squeak", and the default stuff that ordinary end users
can do with it, must be reasonably rock solid and stable and usable.

The Swiki currently contains outright lies about the state of PU for
Squeak 3.10. Even most of the basic guidelines of PU are being
totally ignored by the current state of the default one for 3.10.2.
It is a totally horrendous and completely useless mess so far as I can
tell.

At the moment _nobody_ I know will _ever_ even dare try Squeak in this
state, not even the programmers, but certainly not anyone more
"beginner" than myself.

From a user interface perspective I find SqueakMap infinitely more
usable -- if it only contained dependency information and ways to do
something with it too.... At least some simple filters can be used to
give higher assurance that something might actually work when the user
tries it.
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Keith Hodges]

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Keith Hodges

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 5:17 AM, Keith Hodges

Post by Keith Hodges
With Sake/Packages, everyone is a czar of packages :-)

Saying "everyone is a czar" is like saying "nobody is a czar".

No it isnt.

Actually literally it is. Not everyone is capable, let alone inclined
to do what you suggest.

Now then lets not get into an argument. I never said that they HAVE to,
I said that they CAN.

It only takes ONE person to find that a package doesnt work, and it only
takes ONE person to fix it. They don't have to be the same person, and
they don't have to be one person.

Anyone who has a problem with any package in Sake/Packages can go onto
squeak irc and may find perhaps 2 or 3 people there who will know how to
help. They will be able to fix it imedately and once it is fixed then it
will available working for everyone.

Squeak has been without an effective packages solution for so long this
has become a big deal. Personally I think it is trivially easy to get
right, and we dont need a czar at all.

Lets pick an example: Magma:

Magma has 3 installations. Magma client, Magma server, and Magma tester
Magma should work in 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 , and 3.11(to be), and Pharo
(to be), thats 18 different definitions in 6 universes.

So when I fix a bug in magma do I have to contact 6 different czars?

With Sake/Packages I can theoretically manage the package definitions
for all 18 in one single image. When a new version of Magma is released
it takes less than 1 minute to update the specific definitions for all 8
images. The non-specific 'beta' definitions may simply track "latest"
automatically.

Keith

[Tim Johnson]

Post by Keith Hodges
So when I fix a bug in magma do I have to contact 6 different czars?

Hopefully not. Hopefully you would not also have to understand the
entire packaging system. (Or open your firewall to allow IRC packets
to pass...)

- TimJ

[Keith Hodges]

Post by Tim Johnson

Post by Keith Hodges
So when I fix a bug in magma do I have to contact 6 different czars?

Hopefully not. Hopefully you would not also have to understand the
entire packaging system. (Or open your firewall to allow IRC packets
to pass...)
- TimJ

Oh come on what's with the negativity!

http://www.jwirc.com/chat.html

Keith

[Tim Johnson]

Post by Keith Hodges

Post by Tim Johnson

Post by Keith Hodges
So when I fix a bug in magma do I have to contact 6 different czars?

Hopefully not. Hopefully you would not also have to understand the
entire packaging system. (Or open your firewall to allow IRC packets
to pass...)
- TimJ

Oh come on what's with the negativity!
http://www.jwirc.com/chat.html

Oh, shame on me, I feel compelled to answer. ;)

IRC is fleeting, temporary, ephemeral...
IRC is cliquey...
IRC is messy...
IRC is addictive...
IRC is an old, old friend of mine.

Suppose someone has a question about the packaging system. That
person decides to try IRC for a solution. The person asks his
question on IRC, and one or more of the following happens:

1) The one person qualified to answer the question is not there.
2) Nobody answers the question.
3) Other conversation ensues, and the person is not able to tear
himself away to return to the original problem.
4) The question is answered.

Should the result be #4, that leaves the community with one more
person now understanding the answer to the problem. Should another
person in the future have the same problem, that person will be stuck
trying his luck with the four steps above. Or, that person can try
searching Google, and then come up with an IRC log, which he can then
try to parse. That is, if the conversation took place in the public
channel. If the question was answered via private message, then the
exchange which took place on IRC will not help anyone but the person
who originally sought the answer.

Please don't think I'm dissing IRC as a whole. I just think it would
serve the community best if everyone was on the channel, 24 hours a
day, every day, always listening and answering. That's a lot of time
spent on IRC. Maybe that's your goal :)

- TimJ

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Post by Tim Johnson
Oh, shame on me, I feel compelled to answer. ;)
IRC is fleeting, temporary, ephemeral...
IRC is cliquey...
IRC is messy...
IRC is addictive...
IRC is an old, old friend of mine.

Indeed. IRC is not, and never has been, a good place for _anyone_ to
just hop in and ask a question, especially not a new user, and
probably not even an experienced user. IRC channels are coffee shops,
bars, street corners, etc. You go there to converse or proclaim. You
don't go there for real information unless you're having a
(semi-)private conversation and discussion. IRC channels could be
classrooms, but only with external structure and scheduling. People
do use IRC channels as a form of Instant Messaging, i.e. in hopes of
finding their friend/mentor/support person online and listening, but
even with directed IM we all know there are tremendous limitations.

Mailing lists are infinitely better forums for questions, even though
they too have their problems.
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Keith Hodges]

Post by Tim Johnson
Should the result be #4, that leaves the community with one more
person now understanding the answer to the problem. Should another
person in the future have the same problem, that person will be stuck
trying his luck with the four steps above.

No, if its a problem with the package definitions, what loads where etc,
then when it is fixed it is fixed, for everyone else too.

The point about IRC is about potential speed of turnaround.

Post by Tim Johnson
Or, that person can try searching Google, and then come up with an IRC
log, which he can then try to parse. That is, if the conversation
took place in the public channel. If the question was answered via
private message, then the exchange which took place on IRC will not
help anyone but the person who originally sought the answer.
Please don't think I'm dissing IRC as a whole. I just think it would
serve the community best if everyone was on the channel, 24 hours a
day, every day, always listening and answering. That's a lot of time
spent on IRC.

gad-zukes, you have discovered my secret!

Keith

Post by Tim Johnson
Maybe that's your goal :)
- TimJ

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Post by Keith Hodges
Now then lets not get into an argument. I never said that they HAVE to,
I said that they CAN.

:-) Indeed.

However with the current state of affairs it would seem that if you
don't build your own PU then you can't have a stable and usable set of
packages from which to build your working images with. At my level
I'm not even sure how I switch from one PU to another, let alone how I
might build my own whole PU! Even calling it a "universe" makes it
far too daunting for end users to consider rolling their own. "What,
I have to create a whole universe!?!?!?" :-)

Post by Keith Hodges
Squeak has been without an effective packages solution for so long this
has become a big deal.

I would say the main part of the problem is that there is this "new"
thing called the Package Universes tool but it really wasn't needed in
the first place -- it was a quick blast at an attempt to solve some
perceived problems without proper consideration of how those problems
could be solved with existing tools and without proper consideration
of the effects such a new tool could have on the the thing called
"Squeak" and the community that uses it. As such it turns out to be
totally un-maintainable and useless.

Unfortunately it is installed as a great big button in the default
release and everyone is seemingly told to use it to get stuff they want.

I really think SqueakMap with dependencies would be the right fix. At
least with SqueakMap I can filter out stuff that hasn't been "blessed"
by its maintainer(s) to work on my current release and that really
just leaves the dependencies and conflicts problems. I think end
users could pretty much live with SqueakMap if the default filters
were set to only show stable packages for the release being run, and
if the dependency and conflict handling problems were solved.

Personally if I were in any way responsible for the Squeak 3.10.2
release I'd be removing the Package Universe button from the image and
pushing out a new release and update stream _yesterday_.

Post by Keith Hodges
Magma has 3 installations. Magma client, Magma server, and Magma tester
Magma should work in 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 , and 3.11(to be), and Pharo
(to be), thats 18 different definitions in 6 universes.
So when I fix a bug in magma do I have to contact 6 different czars?

With the Package Universes way of doing things, IIUC, yes, you really
must. Someone has to take responsibility to bless new packages in
each release.

Package Universes are the logical equivalent to the pkgsrc/ports
systems in the BSD Unix world. Pkgsrc is effectively a set of build
and install rules that end users can use to obtain specific versions
of packages that have been tested and ported to the OS release they
are using. For example in NetBSD pkgsrc the currently "blessed"
version of Squeak is still 3.9-final-7067 and it is expected to work
on all currently supported releases of NetBSD on any supported
hardware platform. If/when someone ports and tests a newer Squeak
release to NetBSD _and_ submits an update to the pkgsrc/lang/squeak
module then NetBSD users of Squeak will be able to upgrade. Until
that time though only the adventuresome who know how to port and test
software from scratch will try any newer release of Squeak on NetBSD.
This process works for over 7,000 packages that have been ported and
tested to work on NetBSD (and a similar amount for FreeBSD "ports").
End users can pick and choose from any or all of those 7,000 packages
and have reasonable expectations that they will all install and
actually work.

In the BSD world package maintainers who care about their package on a
given version of BSD and/or GNU/Linux or Solaris and/or whatever do
indeed have to contact each pkgsrc/ports/whatever project to let them
know about the new release and perhaps if they really care they'll
provide updates to the relevant rules module so that each project can
more quickly update their packaging system.

Also, in pkgsrc, for example, maintainers might take responsibility
for a given package or sets of packages and watch for updates from the
original authors (or even in some cases the pkgsrc maintainer is the
author). These maintainers have commit rights to update the relevant
pkgsrc rules modules.

See www.pkgsrc.org if you're interested in more detail. There are
lots of applicable things that can be learned there -- especially
things about dependency and conflict management.

In the Squeak (and Squeak-related smalltalks) world I think SqueakMap
could be a better solution for this problem domain in this context,
provided of course that the dependency tracking and conflict
management problems are solved.

Post by Keith Hodges
With Sake/Packages I can theoretically manage the package definitions
for all 18 in one single image. When a new version of Magma is
released
it takes less than 1 minute to update the specific definitions for all 8
images. The non-specific 'beta' definitions may simply track "latest"
automatically.

Really? I'm not sure how that works. Can you really use one image to
test loading into at least 6 separate images? Can you run unit tests
from one image in 6 other images?

With SqueakMap, IIUC, you can immediately say which releases you or
your beta testers have tested your new packages against. As an
unaffiliated user I can choose to turn off the release filter in my
SqueakMap interface and see your new version and try it out even if it
hasn't been tested on the release I'm using. At least then I know I'm
entering new territory on my own.
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Keith Hodges]

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Keith Hodges
Now then lets not get into an argument. I never said that they HAVE to,
I said that they CAN.

:-) Indeed.
However with the current state of affairs it would seem that if you
don't build your own PU then you can't have a stable and usable set of
packages from which to build your working images with. At my level
I'm not even sure how I switch from one PU to another, let alone how I
might build my own whole PU! Even calling it a "universe" makes it
far too daunting for end users to consider rolling their own. "What,
I have to create a whole universe!?!?!?" :-)

You are preaching to the converted here, I got so frustrated with
Package Universes, I re-implemented the whole thing in a weekend, and
felt a lot better for it.

The result of that work is Sake/Packages, ok it steals data from
Universes, but it is a whole different animal.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Keith Hodges
Squeak has been without an effective packages solution for so long this
has become a big deal.

I would say the main part of the problem is that there is this "new"
thing called the Package Universes tool

Its not that new, its been around for a couple of years at least. That's
why I figured it had had its day.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
but it really wasn't needed in the first place -- it was a quick blast
at an attempt to solve some perceived problems without proper
consideration of how those problems could be solved with existing
tools and without proper consideration of the effects such a new tool
could have on the the thing called "Squeak" and the community that
uses it. As such it turns out to be totally un-maintainable and useless.

Again, thats why I implemented Sake/Packages.

However what is less clear is how bidirectional integration between
SqueakMap and Sake/Packages would be achieved.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
Unfortunately it is installed as a great big button in the default
release and everyone is seemingly told to use it to get stuff they want.

I am working on a release of 3.10.2 that is specifically designed for
building things from. I took that button away.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
I really think SqueakMap with dependencies would be the right fix. At
least with SqueakMap I can filter out stuff that hasn't been "blessed"
by its maintainer(s) to work on my current release and that really
just leaves the dependencies and conflicts problems. I think end
users could pretty much live with SqueakMap if the default filters
were set to only show stable packages for the release being run, and
if the dependency and conflict handling problems were solved.
Personally if I were in any way responsible for the Squeak 3.10.2
release I'd be removing the Package Universe button from the image and
pushing out a new release and update stream _yesterday_.

or just fixing the universe? Its the 3.10 release folks that are
suggesting a czar.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Keith Hodges
Magma has 3 installations. Magma client, Magma server, and Magma tester
Magma should work in 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 , and 3.11(to be), and Pharo
(to be), thats 18 different definitions in 6 universes.
So when I fix a bug in magma do I have to contact 6 different czars?

With the Package Universes way of doing things, IIUC, yes, you really
must. Someone has to take responsibility to bless new packages in
each release.
Package Universes are the logical equivalent to the pkgsrc/ports
systems in the BSD Unix world. Pkgsrc is effectively a set of build
and install rules that end users can use to obtain specific versions
of packages that have been tested and ported to the OS release they
are using. For example in NetBSD pkgsrc the currently "blessed"
version of Squeak is still 3.9-final-7067 and it is expected to work
on all currently supported releases of NetBSD on any supported
hardware platform. If/when someone ports and tests a newer Squeak
release to NetBSD _and_ submits an update to the pkgsrc/lang/squeak
module then NetBSD users of Squeak will be able to upgrade. Until
that time though only the adventuresome who know how to port and test
software from scratch will try any newer release of Squeak on NetBSD.
This process works for over 7,000 packages that have been ported and
tested to work on NetBSD (and a similar amount for FreeBSD "ports").
End users can pick and choose from any or all of those 7,000 packages
and have reasonable expectations that they will all install and
actually work.

I have never got a linux, or bsd installation tool to work for me. I am
gifted, I can break anything!

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.

Post by Keith Hodges
With Sake/Packages I can theoretically manage the package definitions
for all 18 in one single image. When a new version of Magma is released
it takes less than 1 minute to update the specific definitions for all 8
images. The non-specific 'beta' definitions may simply track "latest"
automatically.

Really? I'm not sure how that works. Can you really use one image to
test loading into at least 6 separate images?

I said that I can update the definitions for the packages in all images
in one place.

Testing is another ball game. The developer of Magma tests it in one
image, and I use it in another, thats 2. Soon we will have an
auto-building capability that will offer more coverage.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
Can you run unit tests from one image in 6 other images?

Magma probably can, since its test suite involves multi-image setups.

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
With SqueakMap, IIUC, you can immediately say which releases you or
your beta testers have tested your new packages against. As an
unaffiliated user I can choose to turn off the release filter in my
SqueakMap interface and see your new version and try it out even if it
hasn't been tested on the release I'm using. At least then I know I'm
entering new territory on my own.

Keith

[Friedrich]

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
I really think SqueakMap with dependencies would be the right fix. At
least with SqueakMap I can filter out stuff that hasn't been "blessed"
by its maintainer(s) to work on my current release and that really
just leaves the dependencies and conflicts problems. I think end
users could pretty much live with SqueakMap if the default filters
were set to only show stable packages for the release being run, and
if the dependency and conflict handling problems were solved.

Well I have to agree better to have one working things than three
different ones. Anyway I can live with SqueakMap without dependencies
also because it tells me that it's lacking. As long as I got that
information it works quite ok.

Regards
Friedrich

[Edgar J. De Cleene]

Post by Keith Hodges
So when I fix a bug in magma do I have to contact 6 different czars?

No, only with one, the guy who take the rol with enough consensus of
community.
Once we have , we know someone care for begginners and not only for
people with years of this.

edgar

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[Keith Hodges]

Current status is that squeak is still a toy for researchers. If some
kind of organization doesn't emerge to deal with less attractive
aspects of software life-cycle management, it will hard to find
resources to ensure its future

We are working on it. Some of us understand these things, but it takes a
while to put all of the pieces together. Ask around and you will find
people to be generally helpful.

You may find that the answers are already there. The base image you
started with is over a year old. Jerome hints that the bug might be
caused by a buggy override. If it is then that bug is part of
Monticello, not the image. Monticello is a loadable package, and you are
able to load a more modern version with the bug fixed.

Monticello1.5 has been available for over a year, and this had "fixing
buggy overrides" as one of its first priorities.

Also I think you would be better off building your image with an
Installer script, this is more controlled and is what some pro's do See:
http://installer.pbwiki.com/Installer

The whole issue with 3.10.2 needing a little extra for successful image
building with Installer was the driving force behind the development of
MC1.5 and LevelPlayingField.

You can load this via "LevelPlayingField" on
http://installer.pbwiki.com/LevelPlayingField How many of these Non-Toy
environments you refer to actively support 4 versions back!
LevelPlayingField does.

And there were struggles with the method of image maintanence which had shifted at 3.9. Most people will agree that using MC to maintain an image was a problematic choice. My take is that MC is an out of sequence tool. Requiring decisions about packaging to be made too early in the process of writing methods.
And patching bugs often cut accross packages. Add that to the fact that MC does not scale well. (Longer and longer times are taken to load larger and larger packages.) And Edgar's time was spent like yours. Learning how to make mistakes and then how to recover from them.

I will write about the 3.11 process in a following email.

Keith

[Edgar J. De Cleene]

We know that someone is supposed to test things for collateral issues.
We know that someone will see if conventions established by the
community are being followed.
We know that someone will be supposed to document the bugs and code
evolution.
We know that someone will be supposed to care for more subtle
problems like dealing with security issues.
I don't like the term czar. In fact not a czar but a person or a
group of people in charge of house keeping.
Going to the best known example of large scale free software, Linux
Coherent distributions
People in charge of maintaining these distributions
Assuring packages are coherent (directories, libraries,
terminology, etc)
Documenting things
Receiving complaints from community (bugzillas and other kinds of
complaints)
Communicating problems to community
Communicating committee decisions to community
Communicating community requests to committee
Before that Linux was a toy for students/researchers at
universities. "Serious people" used SunOS, later Solaris, AIX,
HPUX, Microsoft, MacOS...
Current status is that squeak is still a toy for researchers. If
some kind of organization doesn't emerge to deal with less
attractive aspects of software life-cycle management, it will hard
to find resources to ensure its future.

Ok. change the name.

Reviewer of Packages ? Pundit ? Marshal ?

Not the same person / group as the Release team.
Keith should take a decision.
Or he made the release , or he review , but no both.
The same person could't be President and Supreme Court Judge !

Edgar


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[tjohnson at iwu.edu ()]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Edgar J. De Cleene" <***@yahoo.com.ar>
Date: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 4:27 am
Subject: Re: [squeak-dev] not everyone _can_ be a package czar!

Post by Edgar J. De Cleene
Ok. change the name.
Reviewer of Packages ? Pundit ? Marshal ?

The Bundle Ombudsman. :)

- TimJ

[Andreas Raab]

Post by Edgar J. De Cleene
No, only with one, the guy who take the rol with enough consensus of
community.
Once we have , we know someone care for begginners and not only for
people with years of this.

What exactly stops anyone from being the de-facto packages czar? Given
that this is a problem with 3.10 and that you are the de-facto release
team leader I see nobody more qualified to address the problem that
caused this entire thread than you.

What would the package czar do in this situation? Why can't you do it?
If there is any particular reason (or more than one) why you can't do
this currently (and this includes both "objective" reasons like access
controls as well as "subjective" reasons like community acceptance, lack
of quality time etc) I'd like to learn about the issues involved.

Cheers,
- Andreas

[Trygve Reenskaug]

Post by Ralph Johnson
Saying "everyone is a czar" is like saying "nobody is a czar".
This is not a packaging tool problem, and it is not a problem that can
be solved with packaging tools. Package Universe could in theory be
used to solve this problem. (Sake/Packages might be even better - I'm
not knocking it - I'm just saying it is not a tool problem.) All that
is necessary is to make sure that every combination of things in the
PU is tested.
It is relatively easy to create your own Package Universe. The
original idea for PU was that each PU would have an owner, and the
owner would make sure that everything in the PU worked together.
However, what has happened in practice is that there are only a few
PUs, one for each version of Squeak, and each PU has a lot of people
who put things in it. There is no process for making sure that
everything is tested, so some things are tested and some things are
not.
-Ralph

"Testing can show the presence of bugs, but not their absence." (Dijkstra)
I dream of the day when code can be read, understood, and audited.
Testing will then just confirm that we haven't made any serious blunders.
"The more bugs you find during testing, the more bugs there will be in
the shipped product. (Trygve)
--Trygve
--
Trygve Reenskaug mailto: ***@ifi.uio.no

Morgedalsvn. 5A http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver

N-0378 Oslo Tel: [phone]

Norway

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[David T. Lewis]

Post by Trygve Reenskaug
"The more bugs you find during testing, the more bugs there will be in
the shipped product. (Trygve)

Boy, ain't that the truth!

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Post by Edgar J. De Cleene
My 5 cents of peso (less of 1 euro cent) bet is the cause is into
UITheme or the fancy enhanced look.
Look for LabelMorph, is not a class of base 3.10, for this class
responds to contents: should be subclass of StringMorph (maybe)

Just clicking through all the change sets in the change sorter shows a
LabelMorph class in SmallDEVS-GUI-ke.51.

Here we go again! One more try without SmallDEVS (I think I selected
it manually -- i.e. that it was not a dependency of something else I
wanted, but I guess I have to carefully look for such dependencies).
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Jerome Peace]

[squeak-dev] Re: worst crash yet trying to load stuff from Packages Universe in 3.10.2....

Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc. woods at planix.ca
Mon Dec 15 19:54:06 UTC 2008

Post by Jerome Peace
Sure you wouldn't like to become a mantis reporter?

If I can send an e-mail that will create and/or append to a report,
then sure!

Post by Jerome Peace
Puck would like to know exactly how to recreate this failure.
(So he can try it out on some of his "friends" :).

Looks like all I had to do was try to load SmallDEVS from the default
package universe.

At puck's insistence I loaded the SmallDEVS package (by itself) into a 3.10.2 image. I didn't run into the trouble you described. So SmallDEVS alone is not the problem. I looked at the 3 class side methods for LabelMorph and they all look correct as far as answering an instance. I do not have the Pinesoft UI Enhancements in my image so I still suspect that they have a buggy overide somewhere.

Unreproduceable results are not worth tracking. I usually insist on a mantis report first. I made an exception here. I'll be happy to look into it again if you can describe a recipe for reproducing the bug and put it into a mantis report.

Mantis does not have a email to append feature yet. In their discussions about it, they seemed to think that would lead to spam.

The effort to make a good report acts as a good filter. It doesn't guarantee a report will get attention. But if someone will go through that much work, maybe it will be worth other peoples time to play with it.

Fair warning. This is a volunteer community. That usually means the person something most annoys gets to work on it first.

Post by Jerome Peace
My curiosity would like to know why you are so ambitious as to load
so much.

I want to start with everything I want, either functionality or as
reference classes.

Okay. So the question is would there be a way to do that, that would work?
Then we create your ideal starting image and share it with others.
Advantage: It will take less time to download a 20Meg pre-made image than universe load the pieces from around the world.

Why not make out your list and see if someone with similar interest would be willing to help build the image.



*/>Partly I want to start this way because I have VERY quickly learned

that I can accidentally break an image just by trying to file
something in that someone else has published, even if it has
supposedly been "blessed" in some way by being included in the default
package universe for the release I'm using. I'm not quite so
disciplined that I will remember to be very careful with image copies
later on so I'm trying to create a stable baseline image with
everything I think I'll want for now.

Ok. So making the portmanteau image first, saves having to remember what you left out later. You feel it is less risky than trying to read a module in later and breaking an image you have invested your development effort on. Fair enough.

Post by Jerome Peace
And I sympathize with you wanting it all to work right away. Out of
the box.

"The Stable 3.10 universe is a package universe for Squeak 3.10, akin
to the ones done for 3.7 and 3.9. It includes 214 optional packages
that have all been verified to at least load into Squeak 3.10."

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they are different.

I don't exactly know if what it refers to is the same thing that I get
when I press the "Package Universe" button on the initial World in the
3.10.2 release image I'm using, but I've now proven at least three or
more of the packages from the default PU for 3.10.2 won't even file in
cleanly, and I'm just picking from what I would consider to be a
_very_ conservative list of things I'm interested in.

Post by Jerome Peace
What you may be slowly realizing is that all this is Beta software
at best.

"beta"? 3.10.2 isn't even a ".0" release (though it is an even
number...)

Yes. The release process has been struggling. The maintanence choices got people into trouble making bugs much harder to correct. In the end deadlines, not quality dictated what got released. Somebody with authority has to care before this will change. I wonder if the will is out there.
Still you never know.

Perhaps I'm confusing a nice big button everyone says to press if I
want stuff back that was taken out of old-time Squeak releases with a
part of the actual release, but then again there's that claim above
I'm quoting.

Post by Jerome Peace
Test coverage in squeak is a recent thought.

Perhaps, but I didn't have anywhere near this much trouble with 2.8 or
3.0. Squeak's QA has completely disintegrated, at least if you
consider the default PU button to be a part of Squeak.

Um, the problem you are describing is there. I would wonder how much is due to laxer quality controls vs. the exponential explosion of combinations that need to be tested. There are a lot more options now than eight to ten years ago.

People have tried to deal with it by striping away pieces and trying for a slimmer basic image in hopes that the quality of that would improve.

Except that there have been major additions.
3.8 added I18n enhancements. That introduced much more complexity especially with fonts and character sets.
3.9 went on for two years. It attempted to add so much from different sources integration problems abound. I've documented what I personally have found on mantis. There is much more that others have come across too.
3.10 was supposed to last six months. It went on for a year. It was headed by Ralph Johnson in Illinois with the workhorse load shouldered by Edgar, who lives in Rosario, Argentina. There were communication problems to put things mildly.

And there were struggles with the method of image maintanence which had shifted at 3.9. Most people will agree that using MC to maintain an image was a problematic choice. My take is that MC is an out of sequence tool. Requiring decisions about packaging to be made too early in the process of writing methods.
And patching bugs often cut accross packages. Add that to the fact that MC does not scale well. (Longer and longer times are taken to load larger and larger packages.) And Edgar's time was spent like yours. Learning how to make mistakes and then how to recover from them.

Post by Jerome Peace
Most of the software is released with prayers for its survival.

From what I've seen of PU, and it's apparent thousands of steps
backwards from the 3.0 days, I'm not even sure I see any evidence of
such prayers being made for it!

Post by Jerome Peace
First time heavy users find the integration bugs.
That would be you.

Hah! If I'm a "heavy user" then I can't imagine how you would
describe someone who really wants to dive into Squeak and do something
major.

Your ambitious loading project puts you in the "heavy use" category. Your other posts and your naive expectations of what squeak will be capable of made me think "first time". Your having used squeak back when it worked better doesn't quite nullify that. It does explain some of your persistence and adventurousness.

You at least know and believe it can BE better than the current state of affairs.

I'm still just learning here. I'm not even interested in
doing any of the really fancy database, web, or image maker stuff.

Yeah. Me too.

Post by Jerome Peace
Oldtimers, by instinct born of experience, tend to treat squeak
tenderly.
As if they are walking on eggs that might break at any instant
and give off a rotten stentch.

Having played with 2.8 and 3.0 in days gone by I'd have to say that a
great deal of this stench is quite recent.

Yeah. Puck says: " Ain't progress grand?"

Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace

[Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.]

Thanks for your comments Jerome! Your insight is quite useful!

I want to add one comment in reply to one of the things you mention....

Post by Jerome Peace

Post by Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
"The Stable 3.10 universe is a package universe for Squeak 3.10, akin
to the ones done for 3.7 and 3.9. It includes 214 optional packages
that have all been verified to at least load into Squeak 3.10."

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they are different.
Um, the problem you are describing is there. I would wonder how much
is due to laxer quality controls vs. the exponential explosion of
combinations that need to be tested. There are a lot more options
now than eight to ten years ago.

I wouldn't expect every combination to be tested.

However there is one fool-proof and extremely obvious test that should
always be done in this kind of situation, but which clearly was never
ever done: LOAD EVERYTHING!

It is, and I think it _should_ be, my expectation that _everything_ in
the default Package Universe for an official release should load
together cleanly without even a hint of problems or conflicts.

Furthermore _everything_ should be tested minimally in this full-load
image. If there are unit tests that can be run then they should _all_
run green. There's no excuse whatsoever for not doing this minimal
amount of testing. This kind of QA testing could even be done
headless and totally automated. Obviously finding the cause of
breakage and eliminating it from the PU is much more difficult, though
with the right tools even that can be done automatically. There are
tons of examples in other system domains of doing this kind of
automated basic QA testing: Mozilla Tinderbox, NetBSD nightly builds,
pkgsrc bulk builds, and so on. Why it's not done for Package
Universes for Squeak, especially official release PUs, I cannot even
begin to imagine.

This lack of basic QA in other Squeak-related images isn't limited to
the official Squeak+PU either of course. I've noted that in the most
recent Pharo image there are things that are _trivial_ to test but
which throw up debugger windows instantly when I try them in a fresh
image. I.e. some things obviously were not even looked at, never mind
tested in any proper way. For example the basic Alice demo blows
chunks.

There are even problems it seems in the latest VisualWorks (7.6) that
I've tried too, though nothing quite so drastic as the problems I've
had with even the most minimal stuff from the 3.10 PU.

Post by Jerome Peace
People have tried to deal with it by striping away pieces and trying
for a slimmer basic image in hopes that the quality of that would
improve.

I don't think that's a valid approach in any way, shape, or form.

Sure, the basic image might be clean and stable, but it's useless.
There's no fun stuff for beginners and kids, and there's no useful
stuff for developers.

I would try one of the "dev" images, but they include stuff I'm sure I
_don't_ want. Sigh.
--
Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
<***@planix.ca>

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[Edgar J. De Cleene]

Post by tjohnson at iwu.edu ()
The Bundle Ombudsman. :)
- TimJ

+1
I need look the exact mean, and like.
In Spanish same task could be Defensor del Pueblo :=)

[Jerome Peace]

[squeak-dev] Re: worst crash yet trying to load stuff from Packages Universe in 3.10.2....
Keith Hodges keith_hodges at yahoo.co.uk

Wed Dec 17 02:17:56 UTC 2008
Dear Greg,
some of us have spent a lot of time trying to improve things in work
that has been made available SINCE 3.10's release.
However you are basically ignoring what people are trying to tell you,
and insist on being
negative and non-constructive.

There is something that Shaw said about progress and the unreasonable man:
http://www.elise.com/quotes/quotes/shawquotes.htm

So I wont be replying any further.

Puck points out that Greg is no more unreasonable than you or I. Just a little more ornery.

Don't take this as a call to action for you personally. I figure you are doing quite a lot and maybe are at even your energetic limit of service.

What's being called for here is a recruitment of resources (i.e. others to do the testing). And the call to conscience to listen to the result and live up to high standards. All of these will improve the community.

And Greg is starting to come up with realistic suggestions to get to his unrealistic ideals.

Can we find a box big enough and strong enough to hold an entire universe or two?
Can you or someone else write a script to load the guru's hot-dog?*
Can we get someone different, new, fresh, to do the periodic and episodic testing on a regular enough basis?
Can we get someone in authority to care longly and strongly enough about this to watch over it and guide it to see that it happens and keeps happening?

<...>
Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace

*the guru's hot-dog

Puck reminds me to tell the story:

A guru goes up to the hot-dog vendor and asks
Guru:"Can you give me a hot dog?"
vendor: "Sure, how would you like it."
Guru: "Make me one with everything. :)"
vendor: "OKay, that'll be a dollar fifty."
Guru: "Here's two dollars, can I have change?"
vendor: "No. Change comes from within. :)"

[Keith Hodges]

Post by Jerome Peace
[squeak-dev] Re: worst crash yet trying to load stuff from Packages Universe in 3.10.2....
Keith Hodges keith_hodges at yahoo.co.uk

Wed Dec 17 02:17:56 UTC 2008
Dear Greg,
some of us have spent a lot of time trying to improve things in work
that has been made available SINCE 3.10's release.
However you are basically ignoring what people are trying to tell you,
and insist on being
negative and non-constructive.

http://www.elise.com/quotes/quotes/shawquotes.htm

So I wont be replying any further.

Puck points out that Greg is no more unreasonable than you or I. Just a little more ornery.
Don't take this as a call to action for you personally. I figure you are doing quite a lot and maybe are at even your energetic limit of service.
What's being called for here is a recruitment of resources (i.e. others to do the testing). And the call to conscience to listen to the result and live up to high standards. All of these will improve the community.
And Greg is starting to come up with realistic suggestions to get to his unrealistic ideals.
Can we find a box big enough and strong enough to hold an entire universe or two?
Can you or someone else write a script to load the guru's hot-dog?*
Can we get someone different, new, fresh, to do the periodic and episodic testing on a regular enough basis?
Can we get someone in authority to care longly and strongly enough about this to watch over it and guide it to see that it happens and keeps happening?

We are putting the infrastructure in place to do exactly this kind of
testing in an automated fashion. I have a machine spare with a new 160Gb
of HD spare for it.

"All" that is needed is to...

A) have all packages loading tested relative to an Image with a certain
base functionality (i.e. LevelPlayingField.)

B) Fix dependencies in Sake/Packages as a community effort

and away we shall go.

Keith

[Jerome Peace]

[squeak-dev] Re: worst crash yet trying to load stuff from Packages Universe in 3.10.2....

Post by Jerome Peace
Keith Hodges keith_hodges at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Dec 17 05:05:32 UTC 2008

Hi Keith,

Puck: "Shazaam, he's up early."
Me: Thanks for the quick reply.

Post by Jerome Peace

Post by Jerome Peace
[squeak-dev] Re: worst crash yet trying to load stuff from Packages Universe in 3.10.2....
Keith Hodges keith_hodges at yahoo.co.uk

Wed Dec 17 02:17:56 UTC 2008
Dear Greg,
some of us have spent a lot of time trying to improve things in work
that has been made available SINCE 3.10's release.
However you are basically ignoring what people are trying to tell you,
and insist on being
negative and non-constructive.

http://www.elise.com/quotes/quotes/shawquotes.htm

So I wont be replying any further.

Puck points out that Greg is no more unreasonable than you or I. Just a little more ornery.
Don't take this as a call to action for you personally. I figure you are doing quite a lot and maybe are at even your energetic limit of service.
What's being called for here is a recruitment of resources (i.e. others to do the testing). And the call to conscience to listen to the result and live up to high standards. All of these will improve the community.
And Greg is starting to come up with realistic suggestions to get to his unrealistic ideals.
Can we find a box big enough and strong enough to hold an entire universe or two?
Can you or someone else write a script to load the guru's hot-dog?*
Can we get someone different, new, fresh, to do the periodic and episodic testing on a regular enough basis?

Can we get someone in authority to care longly and strongly enough about this to watch over it and guide it to see that it happens and keeps happening?
We are putting the infrastructure in place to do exactly this kind of
testing in an automated fashion. I have a machine spare with a new 160Gb
of HD spare for it.

If you are putting yourself or even Matthew in the critical path for this happening, are you also creating a bottleneck?
We also need others with similar facilities to go beyond the limit of time and service you and Matthew can put in. I'm talking about fresh blood here.

I know it is easier to choose to do what is within your personal control. All I am saying is that might not be the only way or the best way to go.

Leave time for doing what you alone can do best. Offload the tasks that another member of the community can do easily. (Once trained). If we are to get to where we wish to go we will have to get a lot of folks to pull in the right direction. And give them the encouragement they need.

Post by Jerome Peace
"All" that is needed is to...
A) have all packages loading tested relative to an Image with a certain
base functionality (i.e. LevelPlayingField.)

Okay. That's 3.10.3 onward and the other branches that wish to join the LPF movement.
Seems to me we are there with the ftp release you just made.

Post by Jerome Peace
B) Fix dependencies in Sake/Packages as a community effort.

Huh?
Actually this sounds reasonable. What do you mean by it?
How is it to be accomplished?
When do you teach the community the techniques involved?

Post by Jerome Peace
and away we shall go.
Keith