Squeak Community Hangout report

On 12 June 2013 11:37, Edgar J. De Cleene <[hidden email]> wrote:
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> On 6/11/13 5:17 PM, "Jecel Assumpcao Jr." <[hidden email]> wrote:
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>> Yesterday we had another Squeak Community Hangout (some of the previous
>> ones were on April 22, April 8, March 25, March 11, November 2012 and
>> August 30). Though there were fewer people than normal, I thought it
>> would be interesting to mention a bit of what was talking about for
>> those who weren't there.
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>> Bob Arning shared a scan of a very nice article from a late 1976 issue
>> of Popular Science which had a picture of him running a program he had
>> written for the Dazzler board on the Altair 8800 computer. This was at a
>> store he owned at the time. He also shared a reimplementation of that
>> same program in Squeak.
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>> Edgar De Cleene mentioned his frustration with the lack of something
>> between Pharo's "throw out the old stuff no matter what breaks" scheme
>> and Squeak's extremely conservative position. I suggested that allowing
>> a system to have several separate images working together could be a
>> solution to that, as well as making good use of today's multicore
>> machines. It would also be a way to add security to SqueakNOS. We also
>> talked a bit about Spoon.
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>> Hans-Martin Mosner asked if anybody had Squeak code for Elliptic Curve
>> Cryptography. He mentioned that he is part of the Squeak special
>> interest group on cryptography (http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5776), but
>> nobody there has this stuff and he doesn't know any other Smalltalk that
>> has it.
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>> That was about it, though since these meetings are supposed to last 24
>> hours it is possible that more people showed up when I wasn't there.
>> Most of the conversations are about Squeak, of course, but in the past
>> we have also talked about subjects such as DRAM bit geometry and the
>> effect of alpha particles. And at one point yesterday we had a "show off
>> your pet" moment. :-)
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>> -- Jecel
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> Thanks for the excellent report.
> Next time wish to talk about why we do not have a SqueakCore and
> SqueakKernel as separate projects.
> Also show more pets to far away friends :=)

Well, we kind've do. I just don't advertise it. The SqueakTrunk build
on CI takes a hand-crafted "core" image, updates it and runs all its
tests. Noone notices that Nebraska, Universes and XML-Parser are no
longer in the Core because a second CI job, ReleaseSqueakTrunk, loads
these in.

My aim is to progressively rip more and more out of the hand-crafted
base image, and keep loading those unloaded packages in the
ReleaseSqueakTrunk. I also add the unloaded packages as test suites in
the ExternalPackages job.

Chris Muller has rightly raised concern that this core+extra image
isn't itself tested. I think the answer to this is that (a) we often
have no idea whether some package works currently because there are
far too few tests, but (b) we can always run the full set of core
tests + package tests on (a copy of) the resulting core+extra image.

But right now it's extremely hard to unload packages because so many
packages have circular dependencies and the like. Most of my work
recently has been around cutting the easier parts of the tangle, and
raising the profile of some of the less easy parts.

frank

> Edgar
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On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 07:05:05PM -0700, Casey Ransberger wrote:
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> I think Frank's doing stellar work here. Folks have been talking about
> exploding the image for a long time, and he's approaching a really solid
> solution.
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+1

Frank is doing important work here, and maybe not getting as much feedback
as he deserves. I like seeing the steady progress toward a more modular
system, knowing that the trunk is staying healthy along the way.

It's also exciting to see the new Environments work in trunk. That's another
topic that folks have been talking about for a really long time, and it
seems now that Squeak is really getting it right.

Dave