On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Ted F.A. van Gaalen <tedvga@gmail.com>wrote:

Good morning Mariano

This is something I wrote to Adrian Lienhard, when an image did not run, straight out of the box so to speak, because of VM differences Some thoughts about reliability, and, very important IMHO, upward compatibility.

Good morning

Thanks & Regards Ted

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? I did expect that, nota bene working with the Seaside supplied one-click image and the virtual machine supplied with it, provided on the Seaside.st site itself, that everything is (and remains) 100% upward compatible, no matter what VM is or will be used in the future.

Unfortunatly that's now of the the goals of Pharo. You have two real/practical ways: 1) don't make progress, stay in the museum (like stef says), and live happy with that. 2) Improve, make progress, and unfortunatly, make some incompatibility to the past. Pharo choose 2). Please, for further discussion, use another thread with a clear subject, not this one.

So, that application builders are assured that the things they create will run unchanged for even years to come. In an industrial environment, this is vital.

Not necessary. Several mainstream languages changes a lot among different versions and people just update their code.

For example: on IBM mainframes. many Cobol or PL/1 programs/modules made more than 30 years ago run unchanged and without recompilation/linking. This is actually an industrial requirement, without it e.g. the complete IT environment of banks etc. would collapse. Even your bank account very probably relies on modules programmed way back in the seventies.. ( i won't mention the chaos with years of legacy code here, but this could also occur years later with Smalltalk apps)

but back to image compatibility As a workaround, wouldn't it be a good idea: - if some shell script on the Seaside hosting site somehow scans/checks the image and start it with an appropriate VM either COG or another? or: provide a standard unchanged clean Seaside image in the file directory as default, so the only thing one has to do is to load Monticello package(s) into it?

yes, maybe. Ask seaside people :) Pharo images can be used iwth both VMs

This is written from the somewhat traditional, industrial and pragmatic perspective of a typical application developer, who is not really involved in the more underlying system "details" :o)

It would be almost a night mare in a large production environment if e.g. classes are removed where applications rely on. It would mean and unnecessary rewriting of a lot of code.

That's the problem. It is not "unnecessary". In fact, it IS necessary if you want to make progress, clean, improve, etc.

Please observe: No pun or harsh negative criticism intended here, I do really appreciate what is currently going on with Smalltalk!

No problem, any feedback is welcome :) we can always discuss.

I''ll copy this to Pharo-users, currently seen that Mariano is touching a bit similar things.

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Tudor Girba <tudor.girba@gmail.com> wrote:

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Thanks, Mariano!

We will move the latest Moose development build to this Pharo version next week.

Cheers, Doru

On 27 Apr 2011, at 10:21, Mariano Martinez Peck wrote:

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Hi. IMPORTANT: This is not the final 1.3 release, it just one simple snapshot and one point. We all want a rock-solid Pharo 1.3 release, but that doesn't happens automagically. We all need to start using and testing the image before they are release. It is for the better of all of us. The more we test the more stable will be the release. So...we need your help. What you can do?

1) test test test test test. Use it. Take this image and use it for your regular work. 2) report bugs: http://www.pharo-project.org/community/issue-tracking 3) propose fixes: http://code.google.com/p/pharo/wiki/HowToContribute 4) Fix errors/failures tests 5) Load your OWN packages and projects now. Don't wait until Pharo1.3 is released and then ask "uuhh what happened to XXX? you removed? ohhh but I use it". 6) Do you maintain Metacello configurations? ok, if you test your project and works correctly in Pharo 1.3, please update (or create if you don't yet have it) the #stable, 7) Do you maintain packages included in Pharo? please check we are using the correct versions 8) I would like to see people testing AidaWeb, Magma, Fuel, Moose, DBXTalk, Seaside and all its friends, Zinc, FileSystem, etc, etc, etc.

Pharo-1.3-13173 should work with Interpreter VM and with Cog. For Cog I recommend to download the last one from Eliot's page: http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/VM/

Two little warnings: - The Transcript is read only....and it will probably be roll backed to the previous one - if text editing looks weird....it is Lukas's fault ;) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTMX1f8Lu5w

Ok, the image is here: https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/28517/Pharo-1.3-13173.zip

And it was build by Hudson: https://pharo-ic.lille.inria.fr/hudson/view/Pharo/job/Pharo%201.3/111/

Best regards,

-- Mariano http://marianopeck.wordpress.com

-- www.tudorgirba.com

"Sometimes the best solution is not the best solution."

-- Mariano http://marianopeck.wordpress.com