Pharo Progress Report 19/05/2021 (The Return)

Hello!

The other day Torsten mention in discord that before was easier to follow what was going on due the reports we were publishing, and I think he is right. This reports stopped to being produced when the pandemic arise and lock-down was the norm... our organisation of work suffered and the reports were an undesirable victim :)

I intend to resume the publication of weekly status reports, with a difference: focusing on immediate changes is not productive anymore because we have the excelent report of Marcus for that (which follows the integrations in Pharo development branch).

So, I will talk about immediate and medium-term goals, and steps we are doing following them.

This is the first, let's see if this helps people to follow :)

Short-term goals:

- Improve integration infrastructure for Spec2 and NewTools frameworks.

- Improve quality and quantity of tests in Spec2 and NewTools frameworks.

- Improve quality of class comments in Spec2 framework.

- Since we are in freeze mode: fixing important bugs on Pharo9 and its components (this issue will stay here until release).

Medium-term goals:

- Removal of GTTools

- M1 VM release

- Release 9.0

# Last week work

## Last week:

- moved newtools and spec infrastructure to github actions (travis was being slow)

- fixed several bugs on SpGridLayout, SpDropListPresenter,SpTreePresenter and SpTreeTablePresenter

- fixed wrong enable/disable dynamic and style of buttons (also in toolbars).

- added some inspector extensions to improve visibility of Morph data

 - added a lot of tests to new Playground, SpCodePresenter, SpTreePresenter and SpTreeTablePresenter.

- Pablo and Guille were working hard on improving the VM profiling infrastructure.

- making the ARM simulator work

- Working in the parallel execution of tests

- Improving the stability of Socket primitives

- Fixing problems in the Large Images support

- Extending DrTest to delegate the UI construction to the plugins

- Stef ported MethodWrappers to Pharo 9 (which allow a lot of profiling and "object centric" stuff.

- Finally, Marcus was busy processing PRs and discussing future steps (in part with me ;) ) 

## This week

(as always, this is just pointing in a direction, what later  comes in depends on the work load,  problems, and "unknowns")

- finish new infrastructure to improve integration speed of Spec2 and NewTools 

- add tests to new Inspector

- more freezing actions (bugfixing, PR processing)

cheers!

Esteban