On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 4:47 AM, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr> wrote: [...]
Yes, using the old version of Pharo that you used when you implemented them. Like MacOS 9 programs run on MacOS 9.
If you want to run your MacOS 9 Program on MacOSX, there is for a time an emulator, and for a time some source compatibility. But in the end, the only option is to port.
There is no magic.
You can select between
    -> Inventing the Future     -> Be compatible to the Past at any cost.
If what you have in the Past is valuable, selecting the second option makes sense. (IBM, Microsoft). If not, then it's idiotic.
We will improve this a bit in the future, but this is research, so no promises.
So, we mission-critical users should probably disregard the mission statement on the web page misleading: "... By providing a stable and small core system, excellent dev tools, and maintained releases, Pharo is an attractive platform to build and deploy mission critical Smalltalk applications." I'm sorry that I don't have time right at the moment to address this properly, because I do respect the efforts of the Pharo developers, I fully appreciate the challenges of a FOSS project, and I like some of the results I've seen (very nice developer UI features, movement towards announcements, the collaboractive book, and so on). I am interested, only, in offering constructive criticism, so please don't mistake my tone. The short version of my concern is this: As a "mission critical" user of Pharo, I will trade backward compatibility for improvement, if, as you say, you provide "maintained releases". Those last two words are the most important and incur a great burden of responsibility. I don't think the Pharo project has fully considered the responsibility of using those two words. The short version of my recommendation is this: Have a look at the FreeBSD release engineering process. They break backward compatibility all the time, but, if I have a mission critical application running on 4.5, I will still get essential bug and security fixes for a few years, and I can run trials with 8.0 on my other servers. Moreover, they have an updated documented roadmap that I can look at to determine that I should continue to run 4.5 on that one box while testing 8.0 on the others. Best regards, Mike