Chris Muller <asqueaker@gmail.com> wrote:
Earlier, weâve seen projects like Magma being overwhelmed by the number of needed changes,
I'm curious what you meant by this. I'm not aware of Magma ever having been overwhelmed. Its design has made it easy to be one of the most-available and consumable pieces of software for every version of Squeak from 2007 to today. Did you mean the Pharo port? It doesn't really do any magic, I'd be surprised if it would be very difficult to port to Pharo, but I don't know.
Several people have been working on a Magma version for Pharo. At the time (Pharo 1.0-1.2) the Pharo CI infrastructure was not giving enough feedback to keep the port running. Once a year or so someone comes along who tries fixing the port, and that appears to be too difficult or time consuming for them. It needs pretty deep knowledge about internals. I agree that it would probably not be very difficult for a long time pharo/squeak developer. Finding out what exactly changed and why in the past 8 years is not so easy for someone new. Without someone using it in production on Pharo, there is not enough incentive to keep up with what changes in Pharo. Thereâs a chicken and egg problem there Stephan