Squeak-dev May 2001

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143 participants
597 discussions

Re: SqF purpose: supporting the Squeak community?
by Paul Fernhout 30 May '01

30 May '01

Andrew- I'm planning to let this thread (and the related ones) end but somewhere along the line the point of what I was writing may be missed (perhaps because my original post was not concise enough). Here is the revised foundation purpose I suggested: : The Squeak Foundation's purpose [could be]: : To support the vitality and evolution of a chaordic community : creating, maintaining, enhancing, discussing, and using : an exquisite personal and collaborative computing ecosystem : of tools, components, infrastructure, knowledge, and content : derived from or inspired by Squeak or Dynabook technology : which are open, well supported, and freely available : and make use of ever increasing computing power for humane ends. I guess I still don't see how this statement of purpose in any way denies that people using Squeak or this list have multiple interests and participate in a broadly defined community that has formed in large part because of shared interest in Squeak-related artifacts with historic roots in Alan Kay's Dynabook project, and that people in this community will likely spend most of their time discussing a related population of Squeak-ish artifacts and that population's evolution. In fact, I'd say this statement of purpose affirms that. It certainly isn't a statement of purpose proposing a community for a community's sake. However, it does suggest the Squeak Foundation should put supporting the Squeak community first (as opposed to, say, only raising funds to hire programmers to improve Squeak directly and then ignoring handling contributions by volunteers or other needs of the community). Organizing tutorial information, maintaining Wikis, supporting reliable mailing lists, and coordinating contributions and releases are all things that support the community, and are all things that have been discussed as what the foundation should be doing. Obviously, there may be a role to play for funded development as well -- perhaps in terms of "business Squeak" issues, and especially if such development might directly lead to growth of the Squeak community. Certainly you've made some good points and alerted us to several things to watch out for (as have others in this thread) but I guess I hadn't expected this statement of purpose to be quite as controversial as its reception would indicate. [Probably should have known better. :-) ] -Paul Fernhout Kurtz-Fernhout Software ========================================================= Developers of custom software and educational simulations Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com "Andrew C. Greenberg" wrote: > > >> In short, the issue is, forming a: > >> > >> Squeak "Community" Foundation > >> > >> instead of a: > >> > >> Squeak "Artifacts" Foundation > >> > >> What do people on the Squeak list think? > > As I have repeatedly noted, I believe this issue misses the point. The > foundation should be about the community AND the program, not some > exclusive OR. Anything less would be so much less as to be irrelevant. > The community describes the program and the program defines the > community. Put another way, punning horribly on the various of the word > "program" as noun for agenda, noun for computer code and nounification > of the verb "to program." > > The program is our program. > > Meaning SIMULTANEOUSLY almost every permutation of the intentionally > ambiguous phrase. > > Less is more, except when it is so much less.

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Meshwork vs. Hierarchy in SqF
by Paul Fernhout 30 May '01

30 May '01

Gary- Very perceptive point on hierarchies. (And that raises a valid concern about any organized foundation interacting with a community). Manuel de Landa in his book "1000 Years of Non-linear History" http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/ http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm http://www.kud-fp.si/~karlo/intview/uslanda.html talks about the interrelation of meshworks and hierarchies. These can overlap each other, as you might have hierarchies as elements of a meshwork, or you might have informal meshwork links within a hierarchy. You seem to celebrate the meshwork aspect of Squeak and open-source / free software. Me too! (Despite what might otherwise appear by my involvement on the SqF list.) It would be good to tease out objections to: * managing the Squeak Foundation as a hierarchy vs. * having a central point (implicit hierarchy) for managing releases vs. * whether people participating in the existing community meshwork around Squeak might have a definable common purpose. The thing is, as soon as people are giving money to an organization for general use under its direction, there is effectively a hierarchy in that there is now a decision maker (the foundation) issuing orders made enforceable (somewhat) through money. Alternatives would be to have money go directly from donor to developer, to consider the chaordic model of multiple levels of control (lots of hierarchies), for individuals to keep doing their own thing, or for the foundation to be more like a alliance (Apache group?) than a formal organization (although human tribal machinery may effectively make an alliance somewhat hierarchical by having either a first-among-equals or a "benevolent dicatator"). As Manuel de Landa points out, it is very, very rare for any system to be either a pure meshwork or a pure hierarchy. However, we already have a funded hierarchy deeply involved in the Squeak Community -- it is SqC. Maybe what is happening here is really some people thinking about replacing one hierarchy (SqC) funded by Disney with another hierarchy (SqF) funded by the community (or a few commercial donors), in order to make the development of Squeak more responsive to the organizer's vision or donor's needs (or out of general goodness :-). It's an easy thing to think this way -- because a central release system is a situation we are all familiar with. It is a valid question to ask, should we replace one hierarchy with another as opposed to doing something else? Whether there are better alternatives in this situation is a good question. One may want to look at a more "termite" model of management for how the Squeak community could (and to an extent, does) work: http://www.imaginiz.com/provocative/organize/termites.html In some ways, the "termite" model is probably how much development already works in practice, ignoring SqC for the moment, as people make some exciting bit of Squeak code and others pile more code onto that, and then things get really moving in the community if two or more such piles of code can be linked together to make something grander (like Nebraska -- based on various other creative code related to Morphs). However, even termites are in a way hierarchical, controlled both with pheromones secreted by a queen and also with shared DNA patterns effecting their behavior. So again, it is hard to find a pure meshwork (or hierarchy). Personally, I've been musing on the idea of a peer-to-peer source code management system for Squeak to address exactly this concern you raise. I've been thinking some about this, although I can't yet see how they could *easily* coordinate code releases. Anyone know of peer-to-peer systems used for source control already or got any ideas on this? Obviously, emailing around changesets is a start. Maybe that could be enough with a better prerequisite system? However, even if SqF didn't manage releases, there may well be a legitimate reason to have such an organization for "marketing" Squeak and serving as spokesperson for the community (given the way the rest of the world works and what the press might expect). Your point about "interpretation" is also very important to always keep in mind. I guess that's one reason why the US has the Supreme Court in addition to other branches of government -- to ultimately "interpret" the constitution. Who will play that role in a Squeak Foundation? I don't know. Presumably, the board of trustees, who are typically volunteers. For that reasons, many times paid staff can't be voting trustees (separating the "executive branch" from the "judicial") although this is a gray area: http://www.nonprofits.org/npofaq/03/17.html -Paul Fernhout Kurtz-Fernhout Software ========================================================= Developers of custom software and educational simulations Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com gb wrote: > > I like all the arguments in this thread, but I think I can sense hierarchies > on the way, and while they may be good for armies and conquests and > businesses, they may not be the best model for an open source group. > Purposes and charters rely upon the interpretation of the powers that be, > and that isn't such a good thing when fascists are at the top of the > pyramid. But then again hierarchies seem to achieve more. > > >From my perspective I'm grateful to find something that I can do what I like > with (Squeak) depending only upon how much I know. And I find it very > interesting that people do their own thing and share it with one another > without controls and collaborate freely. > > Regards, > Gary

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Re: [ENH][GOODIE] CommandWindow V1.1 (new release)
by David T. Lewis 30 May '01

30 May '01

On Tue, May 29, 2001 at 10:19:30PM +0200, Andreas Kuckartz wrote: > The original mail (from Sunday 27) did not arrive here - it probably belongs > to those which the mailing list software did not like to send to some > people. > > Until now all the lost mails which I know about had attachments. > > Fortunately there is a Swiki page with the latest info: > http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1852 Sorry folks, I posted the updates to CommandWindow and OSProcess over the weekend, and the server list was rather flakey, so I don't know who got what. From now on, I'll only send updates on Wednesdays. The swiki now has pointers to the most recent updates, start with: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/708 Thanks to Bert Freudenberg for catching the updates and making the sqfixes available. - Dave

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Squeak .debs in progress and available for download/testing.
by Stephen Stafford 30 May '01

30 May '01

Hi, Just me again...I have now packaged squeak 3.0 (building on the extremely good work of Marcus Denker...many thanks Marcus, there was very little that had to be changed) and I would appreciate if, before I go about ITPing and uploading, a few people could grab them, install and test to make sure they work. I have made them available on: http://people.debian.org/~bagpuss/squeak-debs/ these are built on an i386 machine, so for the VM at least, if you do not have an i386 based architecture, you would need to grab the source package from: http://people.debian.org/~bagpuss/squeak-source-packages/ You then would build these by doing: dpkg-source -x squeak-vm_3.0.0pre2-1.dsc cd squeak-vm-3.0.0pre2-1 dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot cd .. dpkg -i squeak-vm_3.0.0pre2-1_($arch).deb You need to be root for only the last step of this (the actual installation of the built .deb). It is reccomended that you build the package as a non-root unpriveleged user (that is what the call to fakeroot is for). You would also need to have the "task-debian-devel" package installed for this to work. It is possible (not actually very sure, I have not tested this extensively) that dpkg might complain that the .deb is not properly signed. If this happens then contact me and I will do my very best to help you get around this. I would be pleased to hear from anyone who is building on an architecture other than i386. That is the only architecture I have access to a build environment on, so it would be good to have it tested on others. Note: this is not necessary for the squeak-image or the squeak-sources packages. They are architecture independent. Note: The main squeak-vm .deb is built on an unstable debian system. It is possible that you may have glibc and libc++ dependency problems on a potato (2.2rX) based system (anyone running testing/woody should be okay). Therefore I have also created a potato version, it is the same as the other, but has been built on a potato system. It is the one (not surprisingly) with potato in the filename. I have not been able to test this on a potato system since the only access I have to a potato build environment is via ssh console, so I hope it works (fingers crossed :) At this stage (and in fact always, at every stage) I am happy to hear from anyone who has ideas, bugs, complaints, suggestions, anything. Feedback is the most important thing to me right now. I know that it works for me on my system (which is a development system with pretty much every library you care to mention installed). I now need to know if it works as happily on everyone else's system. [With just one small caveat, I am only on a 56k modem link...if you want/need to send me large files (anything over ~100k is large) then *please* email me first to let me know that you will be doing so, and wait for me to reply and acknowledge that I know it is coming. That way I can make sure that I get it during a time when I am not paying by the minute for access.] My email addresses for any/all of these comments/feedback are: stephen(a)clothcat.demon.co.uk bagpuss(a)debian.org Or you can send to the list squeak(a)cs.uiuc.edu which I am subscribed to and do read. I envisage that it will be a couple of weeks at least before I am happy enough with the packaging fine detail to actually upload and install it in the archive. It should get to Debian testing (woody) shortly after that (usually about 10 days, all things being equal). It will unfortunately never manage to make it into official potato. For those of you with potato systems you can either use Marcus' excellent .debs or mine (I will probably try to always have a potato built version available, at least until woody is released) or grab the debianised source from the archive and build your own .debs. Thank you all for any time/effort you are able to give to making sure that this packaging is working well. -- Stephen Stafford GPG public key on request

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Re: SqF purpose: supporting the Squeak community?
by Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus 30 May '01

30 May '01

On Tue, May 29, 2001 at 08:54:22PM +0100, gb wrote: <snip> > Sorry folks, I'm trying to lurk, I just can't hold myself back. > > Regards, > Gary. > (PS I've got your book on order Mark, so don't bite back ;->) I'm pretty sure he's tame :-) Schwa

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RE: convincing squeak to use LF instead of CR as the line separat or...
by Stoffel, Andy 30 May '01

30 May '01

John Hinsley wrote: > But surely there's a history to this..... I just wonder why, > given that Unix preceded DOS and Mac, they both decided to > do things differently? [Pardon the hidden soapbox - This is all IMHO] You're assuming they came from the same OS design traditions. They don't really.... Unix seems to be old enough that it can be considered something that started "fresh" while DOS has it's roots in CP/M which was (if I followed the trail of breadcrumbs correctly) essentially a "clone" of one of Digital Equipment Corp.'s PDP-11 operating systems (RSX-11 ?). So Unix comes from a "research" orientation while DOS can be traced back to a "business" orientation and it shows... the goal (though it seems to have lost focus since then) was "safety" and "comfort" for the PHB's. (What matters is the "data" not the OS it sits on) As far as the Mac goes ? No real idea other than it was possibly Apple's interpretation of the work going on at Xerox PARC filtered through the lens of the Apple II..... And that bias still exists.... > (But I'd imagine that the Smalltalk 80 people were all developing on > Macs, so that the choice sort of followed on from that....) I wonder > which tradition OS X follows? Most likely some combination of Mac & Unix (due to its' Unix roots) I try to avoid OS religious wars myself.... mostly because I have to deal with most of them at some point or other for work purposes and can't really afford to get involved in such things. My preference (if I had/have a voice at some point in this) would be something flexible enough that new OS's can be added to the Squeak "fold" without worrying about such things as line separators. But other than following this discussion I haven't thought a lot about it yet beyond that... -Andy-

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Re: convincing squeak to use LF instead of CR as the line separator...
by Richard A. O'Keefe 30 May '01

30 May '01

"Duane Maxwell" <dmaxwell(a)san.rr.com> wrote: In the case of CP/M, I believe the problem was that terminals of the era interpreted CR as "move cursor to column 1" and LF as "move cursor down one line, scroll if necessary". That, in turn, is because that's the way ASR-33 teletypes did it - CR meant "return the carriage to column 1" and LF meant "feed one line of paper". The operating system did no translation of the output stream - the data went out raw to the serial port. Virtually all early CP/M-based computers used terminals because memory mapped video was very rare. What terminals do and what operating systems do are only very loosely coupled. When I used Burroughs' CANDE environment on a Model 33 Teletype, the Teletype wanted CR (+nuls) + LF (+nuls) to do the right things with the paper and the print head, *but* what I actually typed to get this effect was Ctrl-C (End of TeXt, right? the obvious thing!), and what the operating system stored was nothing at all (fixed length records). Note that although many many terminals required padding characters (NUL or DEL) to be sent, the ASCII specification actually forbids those codes appearing in text files (there is some excuse for the C convention after all!), so the decoupling between stored-data and characters-sent-to-the-terminal has been obvious since the early 60s at least. I wrote a terminal driver for a minicomputer (ok ok, by today's standards a microcomputer) once. Handling line editing and delay padding was hard enough that the extra cost of mapping CR to CR+LF was hardly noticeable. I note that EBCDIC has CR, LF, *and* a NL code. So of course does "ASCII" these days, NEL (NEw Line) is '\205'.

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RE: 3.1a WinVM trouble with huge image
by Raab, Andreas 30 May '01

30 May '01

Yes - just start Squeak using Squeak -log: "mylog.log" myimage.image and it'll write everything into this logfile as well. - Andreas > -----Original Message----- > From: Helge Horch [mailto:Helge.Horch@munich.netsurf.de] > Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 2:24 PM > To: squeak(a)cs.uiuc.edu > Cc: recipient list not shown > Subject: Re: 3.1a WinVM trouble with huge image > > > At 13:30 29.05.2001 -0700, Andreas Raab wrote: > >There should either be a SqueakDebug.log and/or a crash.dmp > file telling us > >a little more about what the problem is. > > That's pretty much what I had expected too, but nope, neither is > created. It does manage to touch Squeak.ini, as usual. > > I have built a 3.1a3 variant (still using the old tool junta) without > -DNDEBUG, but that VM didn't tell me more either. Is there > an easy way to > hook into the debug console messages? > > Cheers, > Helge >

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Re: convincing squeak to use LF instead of CR as the line separator...
by JArchibald＠aol.com 30 May '01

30 May '01

=> 5/29/01 4:21:13 PM EDT, crosby(a)qwes.math.cmu.edu => << First, squeak has a 'binary' format for changesets and projects. This format is supposed to be portable between all of squeaks platforms. The fact that this format is ASCII text with Mac line-ending conventions doesn't change the fact that it is intended to be a binary output. >> This is not quite correct. ChangeSets are in a form known as "chunk" form, a text form described by Glenn Krasner, and described in the 'Green' book. Unfortunately, no specific definition of line-ends was made in that description. (It is of some small amusement to realize that the format was developed by Glenn as somewhat of an after-thought. The intention of early Smalltalk developers was to distribute Smalltalk function predominately by means of images.). The source contained in .changes and .sources is in (two different) moderately compressed forms, which though they are text (& binary) based, break rather dramatically when the line-ends are messed with. With ChangeSets, the problem is more pernicious than deadly. The problem has been going on since the mid-80's, as soon as Intel and Mac based Smalltalks were derived (perhaps even earlier), and individual Smalltalkers began using platform specific editors to access the Chunk file input/outputs. It is fairly standard in Smalltalk circle to fileOut a Class or Class Category (or other large segment of a system) and print it out for hard-copy study. These will all be in Chunk format. Recent attempts to define requirements for Squeak submissions are an administrative attempt to solve certain problems, but does not change the LF/CR problems. A .tar.gz file can contain any of the possible line-ends. In actual practice, creating new code from old code, a typical practice, simply results occasionally in ChangeSets having all possible combinations of line-ends within a single fileOut. There has been more heat / less light to this topic than any other. It has also endured longer than any other misery. Regular use of 'remove line feeds' in FileList browsers should be done by any who intend to made Chunk file submissions. Cheers, Jerry. ____________________________ Jerry L. Archibald systemObjectivesIncorporated ____________________________

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RE: 3.1a WinVM trouble with huge image
by Raab, Andreas 29 May '01

29 May '01

Helge, There should either be a SqueakDebug.log and/or a crash.dmp file telling us a little more about what the problem is. - Andreas > -----Original Message----- > From: Helge Horch [mailto:Helge.Horch@munich.netsurf.de] > Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 1:34 PM > To: squeak(a)cs.uiuc.edu > Cc: recipient list not shown > Subject: 3.1a WinVM trouble with huge image > > > Folks, > > I have managed to produce a relatively large image snapshot > (426 MB) with a > half-completed longish computation, and to my surprise I > cannot reopen it > with any of the recent 3.1a Windows VMs 3.1a3, 3.1a4, or 3.1a6 (on > NT4SP4). I don't get an emergency evaluator nor a crash.dmp nor a > SqueakDebug.log though, so I can only describe symptoms: The > VM grabs 440M > of memory, spends 15 seconds before it opens the Squeak > window (blank), > flashes a flurry of messages in the subwindow at the bottom shortly > thereafter, and vanishes in a small puff of smoke. > > The 3.0bld2 VM, when given -memory: 600, happily opens said > image. (Well, > the machine thrashes for a while, but at least the data is still > accessible. Phew.) > > I should sprinkle fprintf's in the code, but have to fetch > the new "tool > junta" and system-specific sources first. In the meantime, I wonder > whether anyone has experienced this before? Any hints as to > where would be > a good place to look first? > > Cheers, > Helge >

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