[From the soapbox:] Update stream are essential!!!

[From the soapbox:] Update stream are essential!!!

Hi Andreas,

>  I don't think this has anything at all to do with
>  updates or Monticello
>  - just with the fact that some of the smartest and
most
>  efficient
>  Squeakers in the world put full-time effort into
>  building a first-class
>  eToys experience on OLPC.

My point is that 9 out of ten of the "smartest and
most efficient Squeakers". choose to develop and
express their vision, focus, with execution using
update streams.

Process has a direct relationship to results.

Anyone can update and save a current OPLC system in a
handful of minutes.

What I am focusing on is the need for the tightest
possible feedback-update-distribution-feedback cycle.
With an emphasis on wide distribution to gather a lot
of feedback each cycle. It is VERY lacking with the MC
process for developing the Whole image.

Yours in service, --Jerome Peace

>Or do you really expect the  (largely  unorganized)
Squeak.org community to be able to effectively compete
with a small, dedicated group of people focusing on a
specific project?

Well, I was thinking more along the lines of utilizing
their results. I want the smartest and most efficient
programmers on my side. The goal is to get a vibrant
living system into the hands of those who can grow it
and grow with it.

I am perfectly happy with what ever self organizing
way develops to bring that about.

Respectfully yours, -- Jerome Peace



>  
>  Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
>  Tue Feb 6 23:12:14 UTC 2007 wrote:
>  
>  Jerome Peace wrote:
>  > Look at how fast the OPLC team develops
improvements
>  > and look at the level of feedback they get.
>  >
>  > Now compare that with the glacial pace of the
squeak
>  > image.
>  
>  I don't think this has anything at all to do with
>  updates or Monticello
>  - just with the fact that some of the smartest and
most
>  efficient
>  Squeakers in the world put full-time effort into
>  building a first-class
>  eToys experience on OLPC. Or do you really expect
the
>  (largely
>  unorganized) Squeak.org community to be able to
>  effectively compete with
>  a small, dedicated group of people focusing on a
>  specific project? In my
>  experience that ain't going to happen. Vision,
focus,
>  execution.
>  
>  Cheers,
>     - Andreas
>  
***



 
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Jerome Peace wrote:
> My point is that 9 out of ten of the "smartest and
> most efficient Squeakers". choose to develop and
> express their vision, focus, with execution using
> update streams.

Not in my experience. Except for the OLPC team I don't know any other
serious development effort that is based on change sets (if you disagree
name a few). And mostly I would claim for OLPC this is due to historical
reasons, e.g., we've always used updates for eToys and there isn't any
compelling reason to change that, in particular considering that the
people involved have exhaustive experience with managing update streams.

> Process has a direct relationship to results.

That is certainly true.

> Anyone can update and save a current OPLC system in a
> handful of minutes.

Yes, that is also true and one of the powerful things about incremental
updates. On the other hand, try to port changes from the OLPC image to
Squeak 3.9 and see how that goes. You'll go wildly fishing through a
large number of changes desperately trying to figure out what got
changed where and which effect it might have on other ends of the system
and how (and if) it depends on changes done three months ago. Been
there, done that. Monticello makes that kind of stuff really easy - if
we need fixes in Qwaq's internal version of some package we simply do
them and at some point we merely merge them back into the public version
and we're done. We can always look what has changed where, when and how.

In any case, those are different trade-offs for different styles of work
and different goals. If you want to make progress quickly, updates and
change sets might be for you. If you want to be able to reflect about
the changes in an organized manner and move code between various images
and versions, Monticello is pretty much the only choice.

Another way to look at the above is where you put the time - updates are
mostly "back-end loaded" as they will require very significant work if
you ever need to do anything with the code after it is out, whereas
Monticello is more "front-end loaded", requiring to put more thought in
before you do things. That means Monticello is intrinsically slower to
develop initially but also more stable in the long-term. Both of these
observations match exactly my experience with both development styles.

But by the end of the day I'd still insist that the main difference is
not in those tools but rather in the people working with them.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

I think that having one update stream makes everything fall in behind
the the person who controls the update stream. The key word being 'behind'.

> One test any final candidate should be able to pass is
> to be savable to disk. and then to be component
> saveable to disk and component loadable (from a
> kernel?) getting back an equivalent if not identical
> image.
I definitely agree with this.

I also agree that this does not mean that every single change has to be
put in a package and loaded in with a whole package.

My preferred option is to enable a batch of changes via a script,
followed by a batch update of the packages as a publishing mechanism.
Thus supporting your 'test' above.

I think many squeakers are so busy maintaining their images in a working
state, just considering the packages that they have under their own
control. I dont think that letting an experimental update stream loose
on my working image is a good idea.

I think that one way of moving forward is that at every step of the
image development process, to release, not only the fixes and updates to
the base image, but also to provide readily available 'favourite images'
with 'my favourite packages' loaded and tested ready to go.

Keith









               
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For now that is about our only option.  But in future it would be nice to
have a universes (or something like that) approach that I can easily put in
the packages I want, and I know that the system will keep track of what
depends on what, what conflicts with what, etc., etc.

Of course, there will probably always be a need for a certain (small) amount
of prebuilt images, just as all the Linux installers I am ware of have
"Desktop", "Server", type options to preload some number of packages for
you.

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