Yes this is an emerging problem - I had a similar thing trying to add better navigation support to pharo7 as my change touched core and Calypso, so you had to get something into core and then loop back to get it approved in Calypso (a few weeks later). In retrospect, Iâm wondering if successful projects that have proved integration usefulness should be moved into the core repo? (Iceberg/Calypso?) or are we missing something to help easily track the journey of a multi faceted change (although this sounds overkill?). Or are there sprint days to try and knock these things through easily with everyone on board to do it together? We are sort of damned if you do and damned if you donât. But certainly we want to endure that progress can be made without losing the will to contribute. Tim Sent from my iPhone
On 4 Nov 2018, at 22:35, Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.self@gmail.com> wrote:
Just to share my pain with you. Try to change something in the API of Commander? I think that it will be nearly impossible. Because Iceberg/Calypso depend on Commander and they are all managed in different repositories. So it means - fork each - probably introduce automatic deprecation - do a PR for each of the subprojects (it means identify for each one if we should work on dev or master and being able to checkout the correct version which is not always possible) - then waits.....that may be each of the PR got integrated - now you lost total focus - if one day you recover what you were doing then and only then you may finish your change.
Good luck.
So to me the message is clear: stay away. And this is what I'm doing. We are damaging our agility on the altar of a pseudo modularity.
So this is why I will focus on my tiny, uninteresting side projects. Stef
On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 3:14 PM Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.self@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Sven
I agree with you. Ideally we would like to have much better tooling and process. Now the last time we discussed with Guille and Pablo about it: they estimated that this is over one year of work. And right now we do not have this engineering time to invest on this because other fronts need to be addressed. Still this is really slowing us. This is simple: I stopped thinking to improve something that touches external packages. So I will not work on the trivial changes that would improve Calypso/Iceberg. Why? Because this is tedious, boring, not rewarding. So yes we can do easily with iceberg simple fix on not external packages but as soon as - you need to load latest dev version (which can be a different one than the current one) - update your repo - fix - do a PR - .... wait for its integration
So at the end we as a community can ask ourselves what is the reward model for such shitty work? And also what are we ready to give so that Pharo maintainers do such boring job.
Right now without really doing it consciously I see myself doing either stupid fix or working on side projects and this is not a good long term approach because the core of Pharo needs a lot of work.
Stef
On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 12:24 PM Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:
On 2 Nov 2018, at 12:01, Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> wrote:
Hi
Am 02.11.2018 um 11:15 schrieb Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.self@gmail.com>:
Hi
Pay attention the following email is not nice and politically correct but it is important for the speed of improvements in Pharo.
thanks for the disclaimer. It is important. I copy that because mine might be not political correct, too.
I think that we are doing our best when dealing with subproject code. Now if we are forced to publish each little changes on each subproject and wait that something gets integrated into each subproject, then I would prefer to stop Pharo and do something else. We cannot ask someone to stop in the middle of a massive super boring and feel like shit cleaning in addition to stop and please publish a PR and wait that it gets integrated and wait that Pharo integrates the new version. Let us be a bit serious and pro here.
I know this. And Iâm taking it serious because I want to talk about it. If you decide that you rather be offended then talk please do. I find it annoying that a lot of topics are washed away because someone is offended. That is just another way of killing communication although it is a state-of-the-art these days.
Or we should drop subprojects. Because changing Pharo is getting a painful. Imagine just a change cross cutting several subprojects. For example, I did not fix the use of deprecated classes in Iceberg because I got distracted by the where is the project hosted and I was not connected on a good web connection. I changed calypso and published to calypso but if the feedback loop is too long it means that we will prefer to work on our own projects (because we have also our own projects and there velocity is high and attractive).
I think that with github support this is simple to get the changes. Finally I heard that large companies developing large projects using github are managing one single repo: no subprojects, with their own PR and sync. And us little guys with our super clever brains we will succeed adding more constraints on the table. How bold are we. I'm impressed by such level of arrogance. This is why I do not like that Pharo gets managed in various repo because it kills us.
Actually I was inquiring what everyone is doing to circumvent those problems (!!!). I have the same situation in my company. Iâm the one that is reluctant to go to monorepo because I donât like my code jailed in a project. But the effort we have to take in order to organize a stable and development version with a lot of external projects is killing us. So can we please talk about it? Pleeeeeaaassseee???
It is what it is today: there a some (a few) 'external' projects that are part of the pharo image. For those, (most) allow changes in the pharo image, while the maintainer of the external project merges them back upstream. That is indeed the fastest cycle for pharo itself, but more work for the maintainers.
I believe the promise of Iceberg is that it would (maybe already is) just as easy to do pull requests against against any repo. The future solution then could be that each external project from the main image to their own repos.
I want to add another aspect to this discussion: respect for the original authors and current maintainers. It is a *HUGE* amount of work to write, document, publish, support and maintain any piece of software over several years, across pharo versions.
Norbert
Stef
On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 10:12 AM Norbert Hartl <norbert@hartl.name> wrote:
Am 02.11.2018 um 00:13 schrieb Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu>:
On 1 Nov 2018, at 19:50, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:
Norbert,
On 1 Nov 2018, at 18:12, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:
I was planning on getting all changes to Zn/Zdc from pharo 7 back upstream (and to GitHub), but I did not yet get around to it.
The current diff between Zn #bleedingEdge and Pharo 7 seems relatively minor, I will try to merge later tonight, at least the part in Zinc-Character-Encoding-Core that is causing you trouble.
Norbert,
I did a bunch of commits (both in the classic Zn MC repos as well as in GitHub) that should help you, it works for me in any case. Zn #bleedingEdge / HEAD is now in sync with Pharo 7 - it actually contains more.
Could you please test ?
The first test I did was successful. There were popups for loading different zinc Versions but that is expected. I will test more today. Thanks for now. Can you please add tags in github for the version in smalltalkhub? Otherwise it is hard to switch.
Norbert