[ANN] Pharo Launcher 1.6 released

Hi all,

Pharo Launcher 1.6 has just been released! It is available from http://pharo.org/download.

This new version introduces two major changes:

• the list of template sources is now externalized as a Ston file. Pharo Launcher will check regularly (at startup and each day) if there are changes between your local source of templates and the one hosted in Pharo file server. If so, Pharo Launcher will propose you to update your template sources. It is a way to automatically get new official sources or to keep stable, dev versions up to date.
• a small UI is now available to manage VMs of PharoLauncher (update, remove, list).

Also, this is the first release done with all sources coming from GitHub (https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-launcher).

Big thanks to all contributors, including issue reports.

Here is the changelog:

Pharo Launcher v1.6

New features:

• #172 Provide a way to update / remove VMs
  

• #131 Display date for "Last Modified" on the form of "X day/month/year ago

Hi Ben,

Le 8 févr. 2019 à 15:23, Ben Coman <[hidden email]> a écrit :

On Fri, 1 Feb 2019 at 21:28, Christophe Demarey <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi all,

Pharo Launcher 1.6 has just been released! It is available from http://pharo.org/download.

This new version introduces two major changes:

• the list of template sources is now externalized as a Ston file. Pharo Launcher will check regularly (at startup and each day) if there are changes between your local source of templates and the one hosted in Pharo file server. If so, Pharo Launcher will propose you to update your template sources. It is a way to automatically get new official sources or to keep stable, dev versions up to date.
• a small UI is now available to manage VMs of PharoLauncher (update, remove, list).

Also, this is the first release done with all sources coming from GitHub (https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-launcher).

Big thanks to all contributors, including issue reports.

Here is the changelog:

Pharo Launcher v1.6

New features:

• #172 Provide a way to update / remove VMs
  

Thanks for this.  Its nice to be able to easily reference this info.  

Is "last update" the date the VM was changed on the local system, or the build date reported by the VM?

It is the build date reported by the system (modificationTime of the vm binary).

It could be better by providing the VM version but it is a start. To provide VM version, we should probably add metadata for each VMs.

Seeing this new interface sparks a ideas (you probably already considered some of them):

- show the commit hash of each VM

- have a history log tab - so if an Image stops working between last week and now, I can review to 

be confident it wasn't a VM update behind the scenes and if there was I can identify the old VM and 

be able to test against it to isolate a problem.

- be able to edit the Download URL

This one is redundant with the next one, no?

Or do you just want to override the default VM download?

If so, it will be a bit difficult because we expect to find vms with specific names / folders, dependening on your OS, Pharo version.

- be able to add additional custom VMs, e.g for latest VM snapshots

yes, all this is nice. You could add feature requests for them to PL issue tracker.

 

• #131 Display date for "Last Modified" on the form of "X day/month/year ago

Love this!! especially sorting by it.

Also the Template column is cool.  I used to include the number in the name of the image but this is so much more informative. 

The Arch column is cool.  The VM Name would be useful in addition, or as a replacement for Arch. might e.g. 70-x86.  

Right

And dreaming of this being a pulldown menu to select from custom VMs defined in the VM-management window.

It is in the plan but we need to change a lot of logic in PL so that each image has its own metadata, including the VM to run it that you could customize.

Thanks for the feedback,

Christophe