On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 1:47 PM Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com> wrote:

On 20 June 2018 at 15:38, Guillermo Polito <guillermopolito@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Tim,

Yes, there you're experiencing the limits of our current process. We were studying the usage of git subtrees/submodules/subrepos but none of them seem a satisfying solution for what would give us a smooth contribution process.

Now, we can enhance a bit the current status by adding calypso in the list of iceberg projects. I agree with this. Actually putting Pharo and Iceberg itself there is something we started to do slowly. There was this feeling that people would complain "agh but I only want to see my projects not the system ones". What I believe is that we are used to see and change all packages in the system, that's in our "blood" as pharoers. So seeing all loaded projects may confuse a bit newcomers but empower experts too...

Just random musing...��
It must be common that projects depend on several repos, so perhaps Iceberg could present repos in a two level tree.��
The first level is a "project" of which "Pharo" would be one, with second level holding Iceberg and Calypso.��
This could be condensed by default so that adding extra default Pharo system repos doesn't clutter much.
If this could somehow tie in with tracking the repos loaded by Baselines, that would be super cool. i.e. Baseline=Project.

We are adding the idea of projects to iceberg in the release 1.2 ;)

The idea so far is that an iceberg project will remember at first what is the code subdirectory (so people don't have to type it all over!).

But this opens the idea to have composite projects in the future.

��

Then we don't use the existing subtree/submodule/subrepos, just baselines.��
After all, those three standard options all started out as separate scripts tacked onto git - its flexible like that.��

Well, yes and no. That does not quite solve the issue.

Reifying projects add some flexibility, but it does not handle inter git-repository dependencies.

The case is the following:

- pharo is stored in pharo-project/pharo.git

- calypso is stored in pharo-contributions/calypso.git

Regardless how you show them in the UI, let's suppose now that you want to do a change that involves both.

Scenario 1)��That is, you have:

pharo v1

calypso v1

And you want to

pharo v2

calypso v2

If the change in either is dependent on the other, and/or for example breaks backwards compatibility, this means there is an implicit dependency between pharo and calypso.

��

But, next time you build pharo, you load v2, and then you find yourself with:

pharo v2

calypso v1

And everything breaks :)

Scenario 2) This could be solved by first doing a calypso release marking v2, and once that release is finished and public, doing a new pharo v2 release with the proper calypso version. But now, all this "administrative cost" means that there is a time gap between the release of calypso v2 and the release of pharo v2.

In this moment, if you just load bleeding edge version, you may have a build with:

pharo v1

calypso v2

Which may also break if proper care with backwards compatibility was not taken!

Nowadays, both calypso and Iceberg are managed like in scenario 2.

This adds some��some safety and order at the cost of��bureaucracy (partial releases, care for backwards compatibility).

Generally speaking, I'd like in the future a solution where there is a good tradeoff between safety and flexibility/speed.

Guille