On 1 February 2011 01:47, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com> wrote:
The fact is that, while many patches find their way from Squeak to Pharo, very few take the other way.
Frankly, i had the opposite impression. For instance, Sets with nil already have more than year in Squeak, but still didn't found their way into Pharo.
Why is that ? - squeak people are sobing pharoers - squeak people are too few to achieve this task - there is nothing interesting happening in Pharo No no, please don't answer, I innoculate this bullshit intentionnally to vaccine this thread against further crap.
What IMO is the main explanation is this: - it's very easy to cherry pick squeak changes thanks to trunk: diff messages, while there is nothing equivalent in Pharo.
Just browsing Squeak/Pharo diffs, it's easy to recognize text copy/pasted via web with tabs changed in spaces. Also the pharo issue tracker is full of these. This gives some clues.
This is a very good thing that patches can be shared. But why not the other way around ? This is surprising because: - 1) Pharo is very active these days. - 2) Pharo was apparently setting a higher quality hurdle by forcing each modification to be traced    ( http://code.google.com/p/pharo/issues ) So we could have expected more fixes coming from Pharo.
Maybe it's because the process only have appearances of quality, but doesn't really pay off. Maybe I had some bad luck with http://code.google.com/p/pharo/issues/detail?id=3468
i was proposed this fix for squeak and pharo both, months before, because NativeBoost were dependent on that to work correctly, because it was heavily exploiting #perform: primitive for retrying the same method after first invocation when there was no native code generated yet, and primitive failed because of that. But i weren't able to force it to be made into both forks.. because certainly i was busy with other stuff, so instead of pushing fix to both forks, i just made a changeset and put it into NB site. In that way i made sure, that no matter if fix is integrated or not, NB works :)
Or is there many examples of issues closed without a clue ? Imagine you can recognize the symptoms of this bug in Pharo 1.1 and want to backport the patch... I'm interested to hear how to proceed.
The simple squeak trunk diff messages are not a panacea. A database of changes in all flavours of Squeak might help better. But it's very practicle and I wish I could see an equivalent in Pharo.
I think an upcoming Ring (yeah , to rule them all) or Torch? project will help addressing this issue. But i can't shed light details on it, because i don't know..
On the other end, I was finally forced to filter out the automated [Pharo-Issues] posts. The signal/noise ratio is far too low to sustain attention, though I for one care about patches.
I wish my criticism could bring introspection, better and - why not - squeak friendly :) practices.
I am one, who would certainly be happy too, to see a interchange between Pharo and Squeak to be easy. I can only say, that this is because two camps using different development process.. and not because of some intentionally political attitude. Nicolas, i encourage you (and others) to come up with initiative, to establish a process , or write down rules/guidelines, how to cherrypick the code between forks. This would help to both camps, so its worth to do.
Nicolas
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig.