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Do you publish the base?

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davidbuck

Do you publish the base?

I'd just like to do a quick survey of VisualWorks projects concerning
the question of publishing the base. Do you publish the base
VisualWorks packages and bundles into your own Store database?

Advantages:
- Any accidental changes to the base can be easily identified with
the Store tools
- Any intentional changes to the base can be tracked (although with
extensions and overrides, there's little need for it)
- If you accidentally change something in the base you can get the
old version back easily

Disadvantages:
- It takes extra space and time to publish the base
- You need to start development with an image that's already
reconciled to the base
(reconciling a new image to the base takes a long time)
- Every time you upgrade to a new release you have to reconcile and
publish changes to Store

What are your preferences? I'll let you know my opinions later so I
don't bias the results too much.

David Buck
Simberon Inc.
www.simberon.com

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Boris Popov, DeepCove Labs (SNN)

Re: Do you publish the base?

David,

We don't publish base, instead we keep any base changes confined to a
package that can be easily reviewed when migrating to newer version. If
we were to ever consider it, we'd need to publish not only base, but any
packages that we might make use of and then deal with resolving their
prerequisites to get the image in shape before loading our own code.
Sounds like a lot of work for very little benefit.

-Boris

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-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of David Buck
Sent: 09 April 2010 13:37
To: 'VWNC'
Subject: [vwnc] Do you publish the base?

I'd just like to do a quick survey of VisualWorks projects concerning
the question of publishing the base. Do you publish the base
VisualWorks packages and bundles into your own Store database?

Advantages:
- Any accidental changes to the base can be easily identified with
the Store tools
- Any intentional changes to the base can be tracked (although with
extensions and overrides, there's little need for it)
- If you accidentally change something in the base you can get the
old version back easily

Disadvantages:
- It takes extra space and time to publish the base
- You need to start development with an image that's already
reconciled to the base
(reconciling a new image to the base takes a long time)
- Every time you upgrade to a new release you have to reconcile and
publish changes to Store

What are your preferences? I'll let you know my opinions later so I
don't bias the results too much.

David Buck
Simberon Inc.
www.simberon.com

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Steven Kelly

Re: Do you publish the base?

In reply to this post by davidbuck

Yes.

Extra advantage: it's easy to compare what has changed between VW
versions, when debugging problems either in VW itself or in overrides to
it that have become outdated.

The other advantages could all be handled by having all base pundles
marked "system", which would tell VW that any changes you attempt to
make there would actually create an override, prompting for the package
to put the override (with default of (None)). That would be really handy
even if the base is published.

Steve

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On
> Behalf Of David Buck
> Sent: 9. huhtikuuta 2010 15:37
> To: 'VWNC'
> Subject: [vwnc] Do you publish the base?
>
> I'd just like to do a quick survey of VisualWorks projects concerning
> the question of publishing the base. Do you publish the base
> VisualWorks packages and bundles into your own Store database?
>
> Advantages:
> - Any accidental changes to the base can be easily identified with
> the Store tools
> - Any intentional changes to the base can be tracked (although

with

> extensions and overrides, there's little need for it)
> - If you accidentally change something in the base you can get the
> old version back easily
>
> Disadvantages:
> - It takes extra space and time to publish the base
> - You need to start development with an image that's already
> reconciled to the base
> (reconciling a new image to the base takes a long time)
> - Every time you upgrade to a new release you have to reconcile

and

> publish changes to Store
>
> What are your preferences? I'll let you know my opinions later so I
> don't bias the results too much.
>
> David Buck
> Simberon Inc.
> www.simberon.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> vwnc mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc

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Dennis smith-4

Re: Do you publish the base?

In reply to this post by davidbuck

We don't -- I tried a couple of times when we first starting using store
(Aug 2005),
ran into issues which I don't remember, related to class hierarchical
dependencies I think,
did not see that the advantages outweighed the nuisance and stopped trying.

We deal with changes to the base as follows (which came out of our previous
source-code fileout code handling) ...
- any permanent change to the base goes into a specially named protocol
- all methods in such protocols are gathered into a similarly
named package
just before Store reconcile/publish
- this means I can create a clean image (no unwanted base mods)
by taking a "visual.im" and loading from Store

On 4/9/2010 8:37 AM, David Buck wrote:

> I'd just like to do a quick survey of VisualWorks projects concerning
> the question of publishing the base. Do you publish the base
> VisualWorks packages and bundles into your own Store database?
>
> Advantages:
> - Any accidental changes to the base can be easily identified with
> the Store tools
> - Any intentional changes to the base can be tracked (although with
> extensions and overrides, there's little need for it)
> - If you accidentally change something in the base you can get the
> old version back easily
>
> Disadvantages:
> - It takes extra space and time to publish the base
> - You need to start development with an image that's already
> reconciled to the base
> (reconciling a new image to the base takes a long time)
> - Every time you upgrade to a new release you have to reconcile and
> publish changes to Store
>
> What are your preferences? I'll let you know my opinions later so I
> don't bias the results too much.
>
> David Buck
> Simberon Inc.
> www.simberon.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> vwnc mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc
>

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Terry Raymond

Re: Do you publish the base?

In reply to this post by davidbuck

Dave

YES!!

I have seen too many cases of accidental changes to the base.
Any actual changes are done as extensions and overrides.
After the base has been published the image is saved and
used as a starting image.

I don't see starting with a saved reconciled image as a
problem. As a matter of fact the image I start with has
all the extra parcels loaded as well. So a build only
has to load our application code.

Terry

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Crafted Smalltalk
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(401) 624-4517 [hidden email]
<http://www.craftedsmalltalk.com>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Buck
> Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 8:37 AM
> To: 'VWNC'
> Subject: [vwnc] Do you publish the base?
>
> I'd just like to do a quick survey of VisualWorks projects concerning
> the question of publishing the base. Do you publish the base
> VisualWorks packages and bundles into your own Store database?
>
> Advantages:
> - Any accidental changes to the base can be easily identified with
> the Store tools
> - Any intentional changes to the base can be tracked (although with
> extensions and overrides, there's little need for it)
> - If you accidentally change something in the base you can get the
> old version back easily
>
> Disadvantages:
> - It takes extra space and time to publish the base
> - You need to start development with an image that's already
> reconciled to the base
> (reconciling a new image to the base takes a long time)
> - Every time you upgrade to a new release you have to reconcile and
> publish changes to Store
>
> What are your preferences? I'll let you know my opinions later so I
> don't bias the results too much.
>
> David Buck
> Simberon Inc.
> www.simberon.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> vwnc mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc

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Dave Stevenson-3

Re: Do you publish the base?

In reply to this post by davidbuck

Last summer I wrote some code and some scripts to publish the 7.5 and 7.6 VW distributions, including the base bundle and most parcels (even several contributed parcels), as part of our upgrade from 7.5 to 7.6. We had not published the base before. I practised a lot on a throw-away postgreql repository on my notebook. I published under special store user logins 'vw7.5dist' and 'vw7.6dist', to more easily distinguish them from our own packages. I tried to set up pundle permissions to block other developers from publishing to these, but it didn't seem to work. I should be able to alter my code/scripts to publish later versions of VW when we get around to upgrading. We maintain several of our own packages for enhancing the base (datasets, hover help, misc, etc.). Some of these have been contributed to Cincom and/or the community, though there is more of that we need to do (someday when the world stops spinning and we have some time). We load BOSS from parcel rather than store because otherwise it messes with some of our system overrides.

We also have a few enhancements to the store tools. Attached is a screenshot of the More Recently Published Items tool with filters for quickly narrowing down the list of pundles. We have a master bundle with all our application code. The main version is the trunk, but we have branches for various purposes. The branches have tags in their version strings ('BPR', 'NNR', etc.). If working on either the trunk or some branch, it's common to have lots of clutter from newly published items for other branches. We spent lots of time manually looking through this list trying to keep our images up to date for a particular branch, and especially when doing a build. The filter settings are configured based on the loaded version of the main bundle, and automatically show only what applies to the branch currently being worked. The load all button loads the latest version of each pundle based on the filter criteria, so it takes the pain out of daily syncing one's dev image with others on the team, as well as the builds.

Additional enhancements we found useful include:

- generate version comment button in publish dialog, which provides a settings-customizable template to insert the ticket number, what classes are affected by these changes, and misc other useful info

- warning when about to publish to other than our main dev repository

- warning when about to publish a package when the main bundle overrides itself

- warning when about to publish when undeclareds are present in the image

- warning when publishing as 'BERN' (when I forgot to reconnect as me after doing some store admin as BERN)

Dave Stevenson
[hidden email]

From: David Buck <[hidden email]>
To: VWNC <[hidden email]>
Sent: Fri, April 9, 2010 5:37:16 AM
Subject: [vwnc] Do you publish the base?

I'd just like to do a quick survey of VisualWorks projects concerning
the question of publishing the base. Do you publish the base
VisualWorks packages and bundles into your own Store database?

Advantages:
- Any accidental changes to the base can be easily identified with
the Store tools
- Any intentional changes to the base can be tracked (although with
extensions and overrides, there's little need for it)
- If you accidentally change something in the base you can get the
old version back easily

Disadvantages:
- It takes extra space and time to publish the base
- You need to start development with an image that's already
reconciled to the base
(reconciling a new image to the base takes a long time)
- Every time you upgrade to a new release you have to reconcile and
publish changes to Store

What are your preferences? I'll let you know my opinions later so I
don't bias the results too much.

David Buck
Simberon Inc.
www.simberon.com

_______________________________________________
vwnc mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc

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moreRecent.JPG (69K) Download Attachment

Andres Valloud-6

Re: Do you publish the base?

In reply to this post by davidbuck

Yes (for my personal projects).

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of David Buck
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 5:37 AM
To: 'VWNC'
Subject: [vwnc] Do you publish the base?

I'd just like to do a quick survey of VisualWorks projects concerning
the question of publishing the base. Do you publish the base
VisualWorks packages and bundles into your own Store database?

Advantages:
- Any accidental changes to the base can be easily identified with
the Store tools
- Any intentional changes to the base can be tracked (although with
extensions and overrides, there's little need for it)
- If you accidentally change something in the base you can get the
old version back easily

Disadvantages:
- It takes extra space and time to publish the base
- You need to start development with an image that's already
reconciled to the base
(reconciling a new image to the base takes a long time)
- Every time you upgrade to a new release you have to reconcile and
publish changes to Store

What are your preferences? I'll let you know my opinions later so I
don't bias the results too much.

David Buck
Simberon Inc.
www.simberon.com

_______________________________________________
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[hidden email]
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Dave Stevenson-3

Re: Do you publish the base?

In reply to this post by Dave Stevenson-3

Oh yeah, other store tool enhancements include:

- a warning on publish when Store suggests a branch because the next version is already taken

- on publish automatically suggest wip blessing level if the pundle was last loaded from wip

- reminder when publishing to a branch that the code may also need to be published to the trunk

- added menu item to #listMenuSkeleton:

  copyPundleVersionToClipboard
  | selections |
  selections := self versions selections.
  selections isEmpty ifTrue: [^self].
  Screen default putExternalSelection: selections first itemString

Dave Stevenson
[hidden email]

From: Dave Stevenson <[hidden email]>
To: David Buck <[hidden email]>; VWNC <[hidden email]>
Sent: Fri, April 9, 2010 8:59:56 AM
Subject: Re: [vwnc] Do you publish the base?

Additional enhancements we found useful include:

- warning when about to publish to other than our main dev repository

- warning when about to publish a package when the main bundle overrides itself

- warning when about to publish when undeclareds are present in the image

- warning when publishing as 'BERN' (when I forgot to reconnect as me after doing some store admin as BERN)

Dave Stevenson
[hidden email]

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Runar Jordahl

Re: Do you publish the base?

In reply to this post by davidbuck

We don’t. Based on old threads in this list, it seems like there is
too much work involved to spend time on this.

We have some overrides of the base, and these can easily be found. We
can look at the original implementation by opening “Browse Method
Changes”.

When moving to new versions of VisualWorks, I doubt that we would
compare which changes Cincom did. Reading the release documents and
running our product and tests, usually tells us what we need to fix in
our product.

VisualAge and Envy had another model, where all code in the image was
required to be in the repository. So by default you had the base in in
the repository.

Kind regards
Runar

2010/4/9 David Buck <[hidden email]>:
> I'd just like to do a quick survey of VisualWorks projects concerning
> the question of publishing the base. Do you publish the base
> VisualWorks packages and bundles into your own Store database?

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Niall Ross

Re: Do you publish the base?

In reply to this post by davidbuck

Dear David,
before I worked for Cincom, I published the base for every release.
I had a separate username 'BaseSystem'.

Where possible, I would reconcile then publish:

- Where pundle renames occurred in areas I was particularly
interested in, I replicated with renaming to a new repository, then
reconciled to that.

- Where an otherwise unchanged subpundle had been republished with a
release's version number as the sole change then I would republish a
superbundle with the unchanged to show real changes.

- (I only did the above two consistently in areas that concerned me
- mainly the RB.)

HTH
Yours faithfully
Niall Ross

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Paul Baumann

Re: Do you publish the base?

In reply to this post by davidbuck

We publish the base code. Doing so makes it easier to identify any differences from the base and also allows us to compare the base as VW evolves. I think it would be too easy to lose changes if you did not have the base code stored and reconciled so changes could be easily identified.

As for our changes to the base, we store them in a separate package instead of publishing a base revision. They are our changes and belong with our code. When we need to modify base VW (or other required framework) then our package contains three methods for each method override/replaced. For example, if the VW 7.5 base contained a #foo method that we override/replace then:

foo
^self foo_replacement
foo_replaced_vw75
^'oats'
foo_replacement
^'tasty ', self foo_replaced_vw75

The *_replaced_* method is a copy of the original code that we note (and can still send if necessary). When the VW base changes then we can easily identify our overrides and compare old and new base behavior to see if the overrides need to be changed. Store had had (perhaps still does) some problems dealing with the loading of override/replacement code. This technique also helped reduce those kinds of problems. By noting the version the original methods came from it is easier to create overrides that can work for multiple versions of the base.

When it comes to runtime packaging, we start with the virgin VW base image and then load our parcelized bundle of changes into it. Having our base changes in a separate package makes this possible.

A clean development image is kept with code that is already reconciled to store-published base code. All developers work with an image that had started from this reconciled image.

Paul Baumann

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Buck
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 8:37 AM
To: 'VWNC'
Subject: [vwnc] Do you publish the base?

I'd just like to do a quick survey of VisualWorks projects concerning the question of publishing the base. Do you publish the base VisualWorks packages and bundles into your own Store database?

Advantages:
- Any accidental changes to the base can be easily identified with the Store tools
- Any intentional changes to the base can be tracked (although with extensions and overrides, there's little need for it)
- If you accidentally change something in the base you can get the old version back easily

Disadvantages:
- It takes extra space and time to publish the base
- You need to start development with an image that's already reconciled to the base
(reconciling a new image to the base takes a long time)
- Every time you upgrade to a new release you have to reconcile and publish changes to Store

What are your preferences? I'll let you know my opinions later so I don't bias the results too much.

David Buck
Simberon Inc.
www.simberon.com

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