Posted by Dale Henrichs-3 on Apr 08, 2015; 7:51pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/Metacello-GIT-methodProperties-json-tp4818097p4818448.html

I thnk that rather than focus on the disk format which I hardly ever actually look at ... that folks should be looking at tools support (like Thierry) ... this is where the real work needs to happen ... good tools can hide the disk fomat completely so why does the disk format matter ...

I am personally not really a fan of this; I've been using git for a while and I am perfectly content with using command line on the disk (maybe I'm rare breed); I have yet to see a GUI/tool that would come even close to the power of command line, but I've been using Linux for a long time.

I understand and that is a tension point for FileTree ... the source _is_ on disk and you do use the GitHub tools (or any other git tools independent of those in Smalltalk) that give you a picture of everything that changed including the "ugly" meta data ...

I flip around and use vi at times to edit a method and of course the github tools for pull requests. But then I use the tODE tools for working with git as well ... but as you recognize, the monticello meta data is there for compatibility and righ now at least compatibility is a good thing ...

As I've said to Thierry some time ago in different thread, I would be interested in idea of having everything on disk side and Pharo would only somehow refresh it's content (just like a Java IDE / text editor would). But that may be a lot o work so I can only dream about it, as nobody has time for that (me included).

But to bottom line this thread (for me at least, because I'm getting lost):

1. methodProperties.json provide compatibility for FileTree, so I don't want to get rid of it (for now)

2. the large amount of file changes is probably a bug (I'll try to be more observant about the commits in the future and hopefully some pattern will emerge.)

3. I shouldn't want to break things for now at least

4. more people are starting to work on Git

5. I need to learn about FileTree at some point if I want to contribute and experiment with (my) ideas (which won't be soon as I'm preparing for my finals)

All very good points

Dale