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[Pharo-project] Delay bug
by Gary Chambers April 11, 2011

April 11, 2011

Well, we have been having problems with applications appearing to hang every 6 days or so (sound familiar?). I have identified a bug in the Delay implementation, rather obscure, but highlighted by our applications that make HEAVY use of processes/(tight, a few tens of milliseconds)delays/semaphores etc. Naturally due to an edge case on millisecond clock rollover... Affects all Squeak/Pharo versions, as far as I can tell. (It is separate from the OSProcess issues I have posted about a few weeks ago). I've developed a potential fix, though I'll have to let you all know whether (hopefully) successful in a week or two... fingers crossed! I hope it is fixable, last hurdle for business applications, from our point of view. I'll post details when fix confirmed or failed then. Regards, Gary

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[Pharo-project] GitFS and Pharogenesis
by Max Leske April 11, 2011

April 11, 2011

Hi folks I promised a while ago that I would keep you up to date with GitFS and Pharogenesis. Well, now that I've handed in my thesis you can read it if you like: http://scg.unibe.ch/archive/projects/Lesk11a.pdf I also wrote a short How-To on Filesystem (alas, the "old" version) and GitFS: http://scg.unibe.ch/archive/projects/Lesk11b.pdf You can find a summary of important information (loading the code etc.) on this page: http://scg.unibe.ch/research/Pharogenesis Although I'm sort of "releasing" the code for both now, please note that Pharo has progressed a bit too fast lately for me to keep up. GitFS was built on the original implementation of Filesystem and I will have to put some work into updating the implementation. I'm even thinking of starting over from scratch. Pharogenesis also depends on the old version of Filesystem. The Metacello configurations load the old Filesystem version into the image, just so you know. If you don't know what this is all about, here's the abstract of my thesis: In the Smalltalk dialects Squeak and Pharo it is difficult to view changes to source code that occurred accross major releases. This poses a problem for development as well as for code analysis: Developers often need to be able to revert code to a previous version and for code analysis there should ideally be a single source of information. We solve the problem by building a Git repository with the complete source code history of Pharo. To build the repository we propose two tools: GitFS and Pharogenesis. GitFS is an implementation of Git written entirely in Smalltalk. With GitFS we can create, read and manipulate Git repositories. Pharogenesis uses GitFS to build a Git repository from the source code that Pharogenesis extracts from the source files. We also show how Git can be used to provide a single point of access for all source code from Squeak 1 through Squeak 4 and Pharo 1 using GitFS. The source code database we built with Pharogenesis is available on github (http://www.github. com/pharogenesis/pharogenesis.git). If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Cheers, Max

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[Pharo-project] Have started an independent developer activity - Thank you
by laurent laffont April 11, 2011

April 11, 2011

Hi, I discovered Smalltalk and Pharo almost three years ago and just after read Chad Fowler book "Passionate Programmer" (1st edition title was "My job went to India"). These have changed my developer life, how I perceive software and that great technology is fun, people doing it more. You're a cool community and I'm proud to be there. Now I've started an aside (paid :) independent developer activity thanks to a cool guy. That would not be possible without all the stuff I learn every day from the community and the urge to continue you give me. Each time I've made a step forward (open a blog, write ProfStef, fix bugs, create PharoCasts) I've been amazed that the generated effects were those described in Passionate Programmer (go read it !) The last chapter is "Go independent" so now I need the sequel ;) Special big thank you to StÃ©phane Ducasse - you're crazy :) Long live Pharo ! PS: nice piece of Passionate Programmer: When I was in India weeding through hundreds of candidates for only tens of jobs, the interview team was exhausting itself and running out of time because of a poor interview-to-hire hit rate. Heads hurting and eyes red, we held a late-night meeting to discuss a strategic change in the way we would go through the candidates. We had to either optimize the process so we could interview more people or somehow interview better people (or both). With what little was left of my voice after twelve straight hours of trying to drag answers out of dumbstruck programmers, I argued for adding Smalltalk to the list of keywords our headhunters were using to search their rÃ©sumÃ© database. But, nobody knows Smalltalk in India, cried the human resources director. That was my point. Nobody knew it, and programming in Smalltalk was a fundamentally different experience than programming in Java. The varying experience would give candidates a different level of expectations, and the dynamic nature of the Smalltalk environment would reshape the way a Java programmer would approach a problem. My hope was that these factors would encourage a level of technical maturity that I hadnât been seeing from the candidates Iâd met so far. The addition of Smalltalk to the requirements list yielded a candidate pool that was tiny in contrast to our previous list. These people were diamonds in the rough. They really understood object-oriented programming. They were aware that Java isnât the idealistic panacea itâs sometimes made out to be. Many of them loved to program! Where have you been for the past two weeks? we thought. Unfortunately, our ability to attract these developers for the salaries we were able to pay was limited. They were calling the shots, and most of them chose to stay where they were or to keep looking for a new job. Though we failed to recruit many of them, we learned a valuable recruit- ing lesson: we were more likely to extend offers to candidates with diverse (and even unorthodox) experience than to those whose experiences were homogenous. My explanation is that either the good people seek out diversity, because they love to learn new things, or being forced into alien experiences and environments created more mature, well-rounded soft- ware developers. I suspect itâs a little of both, but regardless of why it works, we learned that it works. I still use this technique when looking for developers. Laurent Laffont - @lolgzs <http://twitter.com/#!/lolgzs> Pharo Smalltalk Screencasts: http://www.pharocasts.com/ Blog: http://magaloma.blogspot.com/ Developer group: http://cara74.seasidehosting.st

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[Pharo-project] Download choices :) or :(?
by DougEdmunds April 11, 2011

April 11, 2011

Pretend you are a newbie and want to try Pharo. You get on the http://www.pharo-project.org page 1. Top right image says "Download Pharo" That downloads immediately from https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/28437/Pharo-1.2.1-OneClick.zip 2. But in the left column You can click on the heading "Download" Now you go to http://www.pharo-project.org/pharo-download which gives you two different one-click choices, but without any explanation of the difference between Cog VM and standard VM. 2A. And if you look down further on that page, there are lots of 'custom' choices, one of which is a Windows Installer, apparently of the most recent version, but that one says it uses the unexplained 'Cog' vm. 3. Wait!! On the home page, you can assume that the latest release is 1.2.1 in the left column, and this takes you to http://www.pharo-project.org/pharo-download/release-1-2-1 which now give you 3 choices to download, one of which is a one-click, but is it Cog or is it Standard? 4. Wait again!! On the home page, under Shortcuts on 'Stable Pharo' which immediately starts to download yet another version: currently Pharo-1.2.1-11.04.03.zip 5. And now you feel obligated to click the words 'Download Pharo' on the right column of the home page, thinking there may be even more versions to pick from. It takes you to another page. Deja Vu, it looks familiar.... So, newbie, was that clear enough for you? -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Download-choices-or-tp3440405p3440405.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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[Pharo-project] Nice post about files ....
by Geert Claes April 11, 2011

April 11, 2011

http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2010/02/nail-files.html -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Nice-post-about-files-tp3441220p3441220.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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[Pharo-project] [BlogPost] Building the VM from scratch using Git and CMakeVMMaker
by Mariano Martinez Peck April 10, 2011

April 10, 2011

Hi folks. This post took me a lot of time, so at least I will try to share it: http://marianopeck.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/building-the-vm-from-scratch-us… Hopefully it is useful for you. Any kind of feedback is more than welcome. Cheers -- Mariano http://marianopeck.wordpress.com

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Re: [Pharo-project] TestResource bug?
by Marcus Denker April 10, 2011

April 10, 2011

On Apr 9, 2011, at 5:40 PM, Guillermo Polito wrote: > Hi! I'm using pharo 1.2 and I've found a little problem in here > > TestResource>>makeAvailable > ... > Is this a bug or i'm doing a mistake? Shouldn't current := false be changed be changed by current := nil. ?? > Yes, I think you are right... can you add a bugreport? -- Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.

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[Pharo-project] Issue 3958 in pharo: Remove embedded snapshotting (image level)
by pharo＠googlecode.com April 10, 2011

April 10, 2011

Status: Accepted Owner: marcus.d...(a)gmail.com Labels: Milestone-1.3 New issue 3958 by marcus.d...(a)gmail.com: Remove embedded snapshotting (image level) http://code.google.com/p/pharo/issues/detail?id=3958 SmalltalkImage has code to save the image "embedded" into the executable of the VM. Experimental code, not used for years, not useful these days. Removal attached Attachments: CleanUpEmbeddedImageSaving.1.cs 2.4 KB

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[Pharo-project] [update 1.3] #13139
by Marcus Denker April 10, 2011

April 10, 2011

13139 ----- Issue 3979: Fixing an undeclare ref in ScriptLoader Issue 3941: Paragraph (deprecated) has lots of refs to undefined temps Issue 3958: Remove embedded snapshotting (image level) -- Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.

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[Pharo-project] Issue 3941 in pharo: Paragraph (deprecated) has lots of refs to undefined temps
by pharo＠googlecode.com April 10, 2011

April 10, 2011

Status: Accepted Owner: marcus.d...(a)gmail.com Labels: Milestone-1.3 New issue 3941 by marcus.d...(a)gmail.com: Paragraph (deprecated) has lots of refs to undefined temps http://code.google.com/p/pharo/issues/detail?id=3941 ... do we remove all methods? It's unlikely that we mange to not break the code anyway.

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