[ANN] Pharo Launcher 2.0 released!

• The UI has been fully rewritten using the new Spec2 framework and the Commander2 library. UI has been revamped to increase usability, especially for newcomers. The main window is now composed of a toolbar and the list of images. The template list is now available when clicking on the new image button.
• Documentation web site : All Pharo Launcher features are now explained in the new documentation available at https://pharo-project.github.io/pharo-launcher. You can contribute easily by clicking the *edit on GitHub* button.
• You can now have many launch configurations for an image (VM to use, vm and image arguments). It means you can use headless Pharo VM from Pharo Launcher.
• When creating a new image, you can specify an initialisation script that will be run once at the first image launch. It is useful to load your project code in a stock Pharo image for example. See https://pharo-project.github.io/pharo-launcher/create-images/#image-initialization-script
• You can now define your own template sources in addition to official sources (see https://pharo-project.github.io/pharo-launcher/templates/#create-your-own-list-of-template-categories), including authenticated sources.
• Improved image metadata. Pharo Launcher now manages all image metadata in a single STON file (including description, Pharo version).

Le 19 avr. 2020 à 19:36, Tomaž Turk <[hidden email]> a écrit :

Congratulations on the new launcher! The experience is far better than with the previous version, nice work!

I noticed something peculiar - I have two computers and am syncing the folders structure between them. If I create a new Pharo 8.0 image, work on it on this machine and finish, then it gets copied to the second machine. PharoLouncher on this second machine sees the image, however nothing happens if I lounch it. This happens also vice-versa with a new image on the second machine and its copy on the first.

Both machines share the locations of 

- template source files

- image inicialization scripts

- images

- VMs

This happens on Windows 10. This kind of setup worked with previous version of launcher.

Le 18 avr. 2020 à 10:09, Cédrick Béler <[hidden email]> a écrit :

Great Job. It looks indeed nicer.

I found the docs great too (https://pharo-project.github.io/pharo-launcher).

One suggestion would be to add the help contextually. I tried to look at. There is description of commands and SpLinkPresenter but don’t think it’s easy to add. I wanted to add the ling in the help description.

For instance, the one to create an image for template:

WebBrowser openOn: 'https://pharo-project.github.io/pharo-launcher/create-images/‘

Any way of doing that ?

<GraphiqueCollé-7.png>

Cheers,

Cédrick

Le 17 avr. 2020 à 18:08, Christophe Demarey <[hidden email]> a écrit :

Hi all,

Pharo Launcher 2.0 has just been released! It is available from http://pharo.org/download.

This new version introduces major changes:

• The UI has been fully rewritten using the new Spec2 framework and the Commander2 library. UI has been revamped to increase usability, especially for newcomers. The main window is now composed of a toolbar and the list of images. The template list is now available when clicking on the new image button.
• Documentation web site : All Pharo Launcher features are now explained in the new documentation available at https://pharo-project.github.io/pharo-launcher. You can contribute easily by clicking the *edit on GitHub* button.
• You can now have many launch configurations for an image (VM to use, vm and image arguments). It means you can use headless Pharo VM from Pharo Launcher.
• When creating a new image, you can specify an initialisation script that will be run once at the first image launch. It is useful to load your project code in a stock Pharo image for example. See https://pharo-project.github.io/pharo-launcher/create-images/#image-initialization-script
• You can now define your own template sources in addition to official sources (see https://pharo-project.github.io/pharo-launcher/templates/#create-your-own-list-of-template-categories), including authenticated sources.
• Improved image metadata. Pharo Launcher now manages all image metadata in a single STON file (including description, Pharo version).

Big thanks to all contributors, including issue reports. It is also the opportunity to thanks Damien Cassou, the original author of Pharo Launcher.

Here is the changelog:

Pharo Launcher v2.0

The list of closed issue is too long (68) to be listed but you can browse it here: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-launcher/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed+closed%3A2019-07-09..2020-04-17

Here are some highlights:

New features:

• Documentation web site
• Image initialisation script
• Launch configurations, headless VM support
• User template file in addition to the official template file
• Jenkins server template now support pipeline projects
• Support of private Jenkins server
• Support of authenticated HTTP server

Improvements:

• Monitoring of image launch failures to give back the error message (if any)
• Newly created image is automatically selected in the image list
• Allow to set image description at creation time
• Better error management (you will have the choice to ignore them or debug them)
• Add a poor version column in image list
• Speedup (especially when image repository has a lot of images)

Bug fixes:

• Fix use of system unzip on Windows

Regards,

The Pharo team.

On 14 May 2020, at 23:20, Christophe Demarey <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Cédrick,

Le 7 mai 2020 à 08:24, Cédrick Béler <[hidden email]> a écrit :

Hi Christophe,


This version is definitely cooler :)

Thanks

I just wander as for the previous version why deleting image can take some time, whereas it’s quick to delete the image repository. Is it normal ?

In Pharo, deleting files is slow because Pharo visits all the files to delete to check if there are file descriptors opened on these files to close them.
I think it is something that could be improved. In many situations, you know you do not have descriptors on these files and we could have a method to delete without doing the check, just the system call, without visiting the tree.

Another thing that might help my way of doing things. I like to "save as" the image so as to have a quick check point, and the launcher is not « friendly » with renaming as it loads the default image.

Any idea on how to integrate that ? Maybe having a list of images that pops-up ?

For this feature, I have no good idea for now.
I had in mind to use a tree instead of a list of images. You could expand if there are more than one image and see other images in the folder.
The problem is for the metadata file: we could assume that other images should use the same metadata as the core image and use them to run the image. (For now, the metadata filename is the same for all images).

I actually changed once the "save as » in a « save checkpoint charly » where it saves a copy but still load the default name. Might be an option ? :)

« Saves a copy » : do you mean you copy the full folder to another name ?

Cheers,
Christophe