Begin forwarded message:

From: Andreas Raab <andreas.raab@gmx.de> Date: December 17, 2008 6:52:02 AM CEST To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list <squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

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Subject: [squeak-dev] [ANN] ConflictFinder (help needed!) Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list <squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

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Folks -

In light of Greg's recent issues with conflicts between packages I spent this evening writing a little tool called ConflictFinder. What it does is taking a set of actions and computes conflicts arising from running these actions. In its simplest use it works like here:

ConflictFinder findConflictsIn:{ 'FooPackage' -> [(FileStream readOnlyFileNamed: 'Foo.st') fileIn]. 'MantisFix1234' -> [Installer mantis ensureFix: 1234]. 'Mumble' -> [MczInstaller installFileNamed: 'Foo-xyz. 123.mcz']. }.

It prints the analysis to the transcript by default but you can override its log file appropriately. Since I didn't know how to get the universe browser to load stuff automatically, I decided to cheat and run it like here to test it on the problem in question:

ConflictFinder findConflictsIn:{ 'SmallDEVS' -> [self notify: 'Please load SmallDEVS']. 'Polymorph' -> [self notify: 'Please load Polymorph']. }.

After loading the packages manually when prompted the analysis showed this result:

LabelMorph (conflicts with SmallDEVS) LabelMorph>>initialize (conflicts with SmallDEVS) LabelMorph>>drawOn: (conflicts with SmallDEVS) StringMorph>>minHeight (conflicts with SmallDEVS)

So there is a conflict between LabelMorph in the packages *as well as* StringMorph>>minHeight (which happens to be an equivalent modification but shows that the tool does indeed unearth unexpected conflicts).

The next step would be to find someone who ties this into the universe browser and just starts loading packags randomly. At which point a concerted community action of just people reporting back their results should be able of finding 90% of the conflicts in the current PU in no time.

Any volunteers for helping with this?

Cheers, - Andreas