On 26 February 2013 21:26, stephane ducasse <stephane.ducasse@free.fr> wrote:
If you want to use SqueakMap go ahead. I have been there and now I know what I want for Pharo.
Hi frank
I never know what you mean when you say things like this. What is it that you want for Pharo?
I wrote a 40 page vision document just for that. It was not really fun but this is an important document so that people that are not close to us can understand why we are doing certain things or saying others. So please have a look and let us know if this is clear. http://www.pharo-project.org/community/consortium
Yes. I should have said "What is it that you want for Pharo, _in this case_?" I understand (and support) the Pharo vision in general, but I'm not clear on what you mean by "I have been there and now I know what I want for Pharo." I mean, SqueakMap is abysmally ugly, hard to navigate, etc. etc. And yet, the core idea is sound: a place that lets you find cool packages.
A nice note: I browsed it 3 min and this is cool to see that some parts have already been done. The cool aspects is that I'm quite confident that we will implement the vision and do a lot more.
Now to reply to your question is a bad three line (the full answer is nicely explained in the vision doc): I want an automated validated tested distributions and core system. I want that users can click on a package and that it loads and all the tests are green and the smallLint rule ok. I think that this is a minimum. And I do not want to rely on servers that can disappear.
I tell what _would_ be cool: something that does what SM does - lists available packages, tells you what Smalltalks those packages claim to support... and also automatically tells you the dependencies (easily doable thanks to Metacello) and - most importantly - _periodically verifies_ the claims. So you go to the site and it says "PetitParser runs on Pharo 1.4, 2.0, Squeak 4.4, 4.5 and Cuis 4.1" Wouldn't it be really cool if SM-like thing actually verified these claims? (It would have to farm out the task elsewhere, of course.) Actually, GitHub almost does all of what we need: it's searchable, and you can easily hook things like Travis CI to show that your project works. (But of course Travis CI is inadequate for the kinds of cross-platform stuff we typically write.) frank
Stef