On Mon, 2009-09-07 at 17:50 -0700, Igor Stasenko wrote:

A new blood in the herd! Wellcome. Thank you. I've used smalltalk and squeak for many years, albeit intermittently, BTW.

As for the rest of gray-beards, i wonder, how long it to make a debugger window to pop-up with one additional button, named 'file a but report' so then any newcomers will send a proper stack trace instead of a screenshot and implementation of DNU method? I thought the fileout option from the debugger would file out the stack. There is also the mail bug report, but I was trying to keep in my main email client (among other things, it would preserve the thread).

I'm just trying to get a working image with magma. "Working" includes being able to pass the magma test suite. I thought to try Pharo after running into trouble with 3.10. It's frustrating that after 2 days I don't have it working. And I was thinking of trying Seaside with Magma for something at work. I think a newbie would have given up much earlier, though it's a little hard to imagine a newbie wanting an object database... This seems as good a place as any to report some other glitches, which mostly strike me as documentation issues. This is in addition to the problem getting OSProcess going reported earlier in this thread, the problem locating the sources file (which may be a buglet) and my VM issues in other threads. All of this is on Linux, and refers to http://www.pharo-project.org/pharo-download. I'm guessing life is easier for Windows or Mac users. First, it would be useful if that page clarified the VM requirements and whether Pharo requires a fork of the VM (I take it one needs a VM with block closures--which means pretty recent--but the VM itself is not forked). I also was unsure what would happen if I had different VMs lying around, though that might be too esoteric to put on the page. Oh, and there is no statement "you need image, changes, source, and a VM and here is how they are related." Second, the instructions say "When downloads are completed, uncompress all files in a folder (you need an .image, .changes, and a .sources file) and run the virtual machine." I would interpret this as saying mkdir myproject cd myproject unzip /some/path/to/file.zip But this actually creates a directory underneath my project that has everything. Then if you unzip the virtual machine, that ends up in a different subdirectory. Maybe the sources zip would go to a 3rd directory (I just made a symlink to a copy I already had). So then someone new to smalltalk would need guidance about how to put these together and actually start the image. Third, the image has an update facility which was not mentioned. I wasn't entirely clear whether updating was a good or bad idea. I did the update. Some guidance on the install page would be helpful. A final curiosity: I created symlinks so that the image and changes file appeared directly under myproject, invoking the VM from that same directory. After I did the updates, the cache directory was under the image subdirectory, i.e. as if I had run from the target of the symlink. Ross