February 2012 - Pharo-dev - lists.pharo.org

Re: [Pharo-project] Seaside going better

by Philippe Marschall

On 05.02.2012 16:37, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote: > A clean 1.3 image is starting to work. I would still like to see Jenkins > create Seaside-enabled images, because the download times can be > significant, and I have experienced intermittent failures that might be > due to down servers, etc. > > My most recent attempt choked at one point, but I *think* that's because > my attempt to load Magritte might be flawed. I might tweak Migrate (my > own answer to building images) to save after critical steps in the hope > of avoiding lots of lost time when things don't go well. You may want to have a look at Lukas' load scripts [1]. [1] https://github.com/renggli/builder/tree/master/scripts Cheers Philippe

Feb. 5, 2012

Re: [Pharo-project] pharo vision

by Philippe Marschall

On 30.01.2012 09:24, StÃ©phane Ducasse wrote: OK, so here's my take. I try to not turn this into a wish list. Rich libraries While I obviously agree that rich libraries are valuable I believe it's important to have clear guidelines to what should be part of Pharo and what not. In one extreme I could have everything from SqS be part of Pharo. I don't think this is the idea. You don't want to have the same discussion for every library whether it should be part of Pharo. FFI First I think we need to have a problem statement. We want to be able to use libraries written in C from Pharo. We don't implement them in Pharo because we don't have the resources to develop them or Pharo is unsuited for the task. This sucks because it's no longer "turtles all the way down" but better than nothing. Since blocking C calls block the entire VM until the call returns we need to have "threaded-FFI". Yes, I do think that callbacks should be mentioned here. Currently the situation as I understand it is: - use FFI for call-outs - use Alien for call-backs - use NativeBoost for faster callouts? "portable plugins"? It would be really nice to have a better, more integrated solution here. If that results in something that's more than a one liner for a C call that's fine with me. 64 bit I think it's important to make a distinction between 64bit images and 64 bit VMs. 64 bit VMs Unless you on a small device current systems are 64bit. While most of them offer some sort of way for running 32bit applications this cannot be the way forward since: - it clearly marks the application as legacy - you can only talk to 32bit libraries (see FFI) - we don't know how long this will still be supported (Apple anybody?) I don't know how much work is required to make Cog run on 64bit. 64bit images While it would be nice to have multi gigabyte images (maybe not) I don't think it's realistic to assume we have the resources to come up with a GC that can handle such images. SOAP SOAP is a massive resource sink [1]. Yes it would be nice to have good support but the cost is prohibitive and better spent on other things. Sockets I don't think the socket layer is holding us back. Sure, it's ugly, sure, it can â and should â be improved, but it's not holding us back. IMO it's missing four things: - better documentation with examples, this is important and relatively easy to do - SSL, this is "just" an issue for clients since servers are fronted anyway. I know Sven's working on this. - sendfile support. This would allow us to send files efficiently over the network without touching user space. Since we're fronted anyway this is not a big deal. - asynchronous support. This would allow us to have a large amount of open connections for things like WebSockets. May be too much work to get it working on Mac/Linux/Windows. This alone doesn't give us WebSockets, we still need to write quite some infrastructure on top of it so you'll probably want to deprioritize if not drop this. I know I have a narrow Seaside-centric focus here. What would be nice is to have a generic client-server framework (how many times have I written a socket-loop?) but I don't think this should be part of Pharo. Load balancer I don't think this needs to be part of Pharo. Apache already does this. UI frameworks: Have you considered cutting your losses? You have your existing infrastructure that requires more resources than you have and if you could you rewrote it. Then in addition you have new requirements and you want to come up with new paradigms. I feel this alone can consume more your entire resources. Options that I would consider: - status quo, maintenance only, no further development - drop UI entirely, go for something like embedded WebKit - make it somebody else's problem, once you have better FFI generate bindings for GTK/QT/â¦ This is not giving up. This is not fighting battles you cannot win. Plug Computer Really? You have all the other places that need more resources and you want to do even more. Now the things that aren't on your list: VM: Better JIT, allocator, collector. No matter how good your VM is it's never good enough and there's always useful stuff you can add like monitoring. #identityHash It would certainly be nice to have more than 12 hash bits, especially form a performance PoV. IIRC there was once talk of getting rid of compact classes. I take an additional hash bit over an immutability bit any time. Infrastructure If your tools and build infrastructure are holding you back fix them. I would be quite happy if a year from now Pharo is exactly the same and the only thing that changed is the infrastructure you use to build Pharo is way better. I know Seaside sucks at this as well. Migration Support Since you're changing quite a lot of things (SystemDictionary/SmalltakImage, file system, streams, â¦) it would be nice to have support to: - tell the user where he uses deprecated code - assist the user in migrating to new APIs this can also help you migrate everything in Pharo to the new APIs. You probably want to build on top of the rewrite engine of RB. Since you don't have static types the migration can probably only done in a semi-automated way presenting the user a list of possible matches and letting him select the appropriate ones. The deprecation support has been discussed previously. This is probably the only thing in this list that could be put into research papers. Releases I know Seaside sucks at this as well so this isn't a flame. To me as an outsider the release process of Pharo is confusing. I find the release process of Eclipse [2] [3] better. The main points are: - One main release every year - Two bugfix releases every year - after the two bugfix releases a new main release is done and the old main release becomes unsupported The releases are date driven, not feature driven. The dates for the ga, rc and milestone releases as well as feature and API freezes are set years in advance. That has downsides. For example if your feature misses a deadline, you have to wait for more than a year to see it in a release. But it makes everything nicely planable. [1] http://www.innoq.com/soa/ws-standards/poster/innoQ%20WS-Standards%20Poster%… [2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Simultaneous_Release [3] http://wiki.eclipse.org/SimRel/Overview Cheers Philippe

Feb. 5, 2012

[Pharo-project] startDrag: error

by StÃ©phane Ducasse

Hi guys In 1.4 I get from time to time a problem with PluggableListMorph>>startDrag: evt |row ddm draggedItem draggedItemMorph | dragItemSelector ifNotNil: [ ^self startDragExtended: evt ]. evt hand hasSubmorphs ifTrue: [^ self]. (self dragEnabled and: [model okToChange]) ifFalse: [^ self]. (row := self mouseDownRow) ifNil: [ draggedItem := self getListItem: lastNonZeroIndex. "self selection" ] where lastNonZeroIndex is nil ifNotNil: [ draggedItem := self getListItem: row ]. "Here I ensureat least one element is selected " draggedItem ifNil: [ ^ self ]. self isMultipleSelection ifTrue: [ | passengers | passengers := self model dragPassengersFor: draggedItem inMorph: self. passengers ifNil: [ ^ self ]. draggedItemMorph := StringMorph contents: (passengers joinUsing: ' ') asStringOrText. ddm := TransferMorph withPassenger: passengers from: self ] ifFalse: [ | passenger | passenger := self model dragPassengerFor: draggedItem inMorph: self. passenger ifNil: [ ^ self ]. draggedItemMorph := StringMorph contents: passenger asStringOrText. ddm := TransferMorph withPassenger: passenger from: self ]. self mouseDownRow: nil. ddm dragTransferType: (self model dragTransferTypeForMorph: self). [evt hand grabMorph: ddm ] ensure: [ Cursor normal show. evt hand releaseMouseFocus: self] listSelectionAt: index index isZero ifFalse:[ lastNonZeroIndex := index ]. getSelectionListSelector ifNil:[^false]. ^model perform: getSelectionListSelector with: index So it looks like there are path where lastNonZeroIndex can be nil.

Feb. 5, 2012

Re: [Pharo-project] Alternative to MC for upload?

by GÃ¶ran Krampe

On 02/05/2012 12:30 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote: > Hello all, > > I have a fair amount of code that I can't/don't dare release because it > involves intellectual property that I do not own, and access under > non-disclosure agreements (some of which are silly, but need to be > respected regardless). None of that code it is relevant to you (unless > you do heart surgery at home), but I need to keep it separate from > things like GSL, PLplot, FFI tweaks, etc., that should interest the > community. > > In the past, I've saved to http repositories and been surprised at > things (fortunately, nothing toxic) that were released w/o my intent. > Squeak Source long since lost the code in question, but it put a fear of > MC in me. > > Is there a way to use gofer or something else to send specific .mcz > files that I want to make available? Some other tool? Perhaps I am daft - but why don't you use either local directories for those packages or a private ftp server (like I do)? I use pure-ftpd which is really nice because it can easily map specific users to specific "home directories". regards, GÃ¶ran

Feb. 5, 2012

[Pharo-project] FS: How do I get the equivalent to slash

by StÃ©phane Ducasse

Hi is there a way to know the character that encode a folder separator using FS? FileDirectory slash Stef

Feb. 5, 2012

Re: [Pharo-project] Seaside going better

by Schwab,Wilhelm K

I wrote a bit soon, but I've tweaked Migrate to try save the image at key steps in the hopes of reducing wasted time. In the NICE(!!!!) column, I increased the font size for code in 1.3 - I can read it again :) Bill ________________________________ From: pharo-project-bounces(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr [pharo-project-bounces(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr] on behalf of Schwab,Wilhelm K [bschwab(a)anest.ufl.edu] Sent: Sunday, February 05, 2012 10:37 AM To: pharo-project(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr Subject: [Pharo-project] Seaside going better A clean 1.3 image is starting to work. I would still like to see Jenkins create Seaside-enabled images, because the download times can be significant, and I have experienced intermittent failures that might be due to down servers, etc. My most recent attempt choked at one point, but I *think* that's because my attempt to load Magritte might be flawed. I might tweak Migrate (my own answer to building images) to save after critical steps in the hope of avoiding lots of lost time when things don't go well. Bill

Feb. 5, 2012

[Pharo-project] Seaside going better

by Schwab,Wilhelm K

A clean 1.3 image is starting to work. I would still like to see Jenkins create Seaside-enabled images, because the download times can be significant, and I have experienced intermittent failures that might be due to down servers, etc. My most recent attempt choked at one point, but I *think* that's because my attempt to load Magritte might be flawed. I might tweak Migrate (my own answer to building images) to save after critical steps in the hope of avoiding lots of lost time when things don't go well. Bill

Feb. 5, 2012

Re: [Pharo-project] [squeak-dev] Re: Trying to undeerstand Morphic subclasses and step/stepAt:

by Sean P. DeNigris

Dave Mason-3 wrote > >> You need to call #startStepping if you want #step to get called >> frequently >> according to #stepTime. > > Actually you don't with Squeak 4.2 and Pharo 1.3 (don't know about earlier > versions), because Morph>>initialize does that. But just for completeness, > I did that, and it made no difference. It seems that if you go the #startStepping route, you have to call it after the morph has been added to the world. e.g. the following works: w := MyWindowSubclass new openInWorld. w startStepping. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Trying-to-undeerstand-Morphic-subclasses-and-step-ste… Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Feb. 5, 2012

[Pharo-project] Creating a file with FS

by stephane ducasse

Hi FS users I'm puzzled by FS api. I want to create a file in a directory so I did | wk | wk := FSFilesystem disk workingDirectory. (wk / 'CSS2') ensureDirectory worked Now I looked at ensureFile and I do not understand the code ensureFile "Create if necessary a file for the receiver." self writeStream close. Because I would like to be able to write in the file and now I do not see why closing it is good. Would be good to add comments to FSReference>>writeStreamDo: doBlock ifPresent: presentBlock "Create a file if not present and execute doBlock (with a stream) as argument, if the file is present execute the presentBlock." ^ self isFile ifTrue: [ presentBlock value ] ifFalse: [ self writeStreamDo: doBlock ] FSReference>>writeStreamIfPresent: presentBlock "Return a writestream on the receiver if it does not already exist or execute the presentBlock with no argument" ^ self isFile ifTrue: [ presentBlock value ] ifFalse: [ self writeStream ] I do not get why we do not get as argument to the presentBlock the file itself? I added method commentsâ¦. as usual. :( Camillo could you have a look at such comments and commit them? I published the package to the fs package. Would be good to cross check and that I add it in 1.4 Stef

Feb. 5, 2012

Re: [Pharo-project] [squeak-dev] Re: Trying to undeerstand Morphic subclasses and step/stepAt:

by Dave Mason

On 2012-Feb-5, at 7:40 , Bob Arning wrote: > Look at the methods #wantsSteps. Bingo! I assumed it was something stupid I was missing. On 2012-Feb-4, at 14:23 , Sean P. DeNigris wrote: > I don't know if it's any better, but when I create my own morph-in-a-window, > I usually don't subclass SystemWindow, but add my morph to a window using > openInWindowLabelled: or addMorph:fullFrame:. I feel like I have a little > more flexibility if I later want to use it not-in-a-window. After defining wantsSteos, I see that color: seems to work a bit strangely too in SystemWindow, so I'm going to try this. Thanks, Bob and Sean.

Feb. 5, 2012