Squeak-dev February 2007

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

161 participants
240 discussions

Re: Making Squeak more accessible and used - reversing the trend
by Bill Schwab 05 Feb '07

05 Feb '07

JJ, We have a small process-synchronization problem: we're writing emails at the same time :) Your recent message would likely alter my recent message. Please consider that as you read, if only retroactively. My experience is that users will gladly tolerate some unfamiliar appearance (aka deviation from platform standards) as long as software does what they want, quickly, intuitively, and robustly. One more pass on the broken record: they care about feel far more than they care about look. We seem to want many of the same things for and from Squeak. I would simply urge you to prioritize some of the other items I have mentioned (ANSI/underscore, end of stream errors, morphic feel) over native look and packaging. Between native look and packaging, look is probably the more important topic for the community. The packaging side is something that a single developer can do, and your recent message referencing RPM etc. shows that you already have ideas on how to do it. The result would easily be distributed as one or more items on SM. Happy Smalltalking! Bill Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254 Email: bills(a)anest4.anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 846-1285 FAX: (352) 392-7029

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Squeak Board 2007 elections process and timeline
by Daniel Vainsencher 05 Feb '07

05 Feb '07

Hi everyone, Its time to start our second election of the Board. I think this is very important - I think that having an elected board has significantly improved some things about how the community works: 1. We have been able to tackle projects that previously did not have enough consensus, such as the relicensing of Squeak and an open process for stewardship of the release process. 2. We have a solid basis for trust and diversity in our board, where before the composition of the leadership may have seemed somewhat haphazard. I personally think we had a pretty kick-ass board this last year. While it got off to a somewhat quiet start, recently there have been quite regular meetings of the board, with updates to the mailing list, and additions to the board agenda regularly solicited. Do you agree this worked well? do you think you can do better? Well, this is your opportunity. Starting today, and for the next 2 weeks (until 18th February '07), candidates for the Squeak board are invited to announce themselves on this mailing list. If you do not wish to run yourself, but would like to see either a particular Squeaker as a candidate, or you want something about this election or board term to happen differently than is described below, right now is the time to start discussing right on this list. If you are not sure how to go about it, feel free to send a mail to the elections team mailing list, or me personally. In particular, when applying, candidates are encouraged to mention their background, general reasons for running, and particular plans if they get elected. Other candidates and all squeakers are invited to pose additional questions. What happens then? the following is our planned schedule, and we don't expect it to change much. For 2 weeks starting from the 18th, prospective voters are asked to make sure they are registered. Remember that the basic criterion for voting is having an SqP account that is validated at least to the Apprentice level. This is also a good time to talk to other Squeaker communities and get them involved. As in the previous elections, we will accept votes from other communities, but to waive the SqP requirement, we need a well known representative of this community to contact us at the elections mailing list. The voters list will be finalized on the 3rd of March, and the CIVS (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/civs.html) election started. The election will run for 3 days, and the results announced on March 7th, 2007. Daniel Vainsencher and the Elections team

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Run external app from squeak
by Sebastian Sastre 04 Feb '07

04 Feb '07

H there, I want to know how one can call some external application from squeak. The fact is that I want to be able to read and parse some contents in PDF files witha 3.9 squeak running on linux. I've looked the PDFReader but I cant get access to the text of the pdf with it. So, I've thought in using the pdftotext that the linux has (it converts any pdf into a text file) calling it from squeak and then access the text on the plain text file and parse it. Any clue? thanks, Sebastian

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Re: Making Squeak more accessible and used - reversing the trend
by Bill Schwab 04 Feb '07

04 Feb '07

JJ, It does seem as though while you are not asking for native code, you are asking for native widgets. There are times when it would be useful (appropriate is probably a better word), but I am more concerned about having emulated widgets with a robust (with respect to end users) feel. I can summarize as follows: I do not disagree with your goal of having access to native widgets. I am saying that I think it is less important than getting morphic right. Rob's wxSqueak has promise, but more than the widgets themselves, I want to have the MVP framework for Squeak. You mention "native package tools of the host operating systems" - does that include MSI? There was a time when I was _convinced_ I was going to switch to it. Object Arts had done so, and I found the Automation wrapper for it. Within a few hours, the cracks started to appear, and after a few days, I wanted my money back from Bill Gates :) IMHO, it is so complicated as to be truly dangerous, largely because they sent a relational database to do a serializer's job. Pretty pathetic in total. It is also, for now at least, completely avoidable. InnoSetup does a fine job. The Redhat package manager looks like it might be worth a look. I have never searched for a Windows implementation, but IIRC, the license does not prevent it. Of course, there is no harm in having hooks for whatever binary packager a developer might want to us, including the ultimate workhorse: zip files. I think you are low-balling Squeak's ability to deploy images. One can package something that starts up with "the app" running. Your users could simply unzip that, or run an Inno based installer, and get going in a real hurry. If your users are developers, you can send them an image with the stuff already loaded. Squeak's license does not stop you. One thing, your idea of zipping up the user's image for a bug report is not possible in general. People will not knowingly send you financial data, and if you target health care as I do, it becomes criminal in addition to being unwise. What you can do is log call stacks for errors and a little more on crashes. I don't care for Squeak's tendency to overwrite vs. append to these logs, but that is easy to fix. Then a user could be directed to the log for cleaning if necessary, and forwarding to you. Health care presents some additional problems: what is in the crash log, and where does it live? Shared drives are becoming common for avoiding such concerns, but if the failure is due to loss of same, OUCH!!! Bill >From: Brad Fuller <brad at bradfuller.com> >Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers >list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org> >To: The general-purpose Squeak developers >list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org> >Subject: Re: Making Squeak more accessible and used - reversing the trend >Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2007 15:45:14 -0800 > >One of smalltalk's wonderful features is it's prototyping ability, that's >true. I think what you are proposing is to create native apps with Squeak >to get developers excited about the development possibilities of Squeak. Yes. That and proving to others how good Squeak/Smalltalk is by constantly being ahead of them. I should also mention, I don't mean native as in "compiles to machine code". It will still be the same system, just with unused components stripped out of the package. >But, I think we would go down the wrong road, and do a real disservice, if >we encouraged building native OS applications. Squeak moves beyond the OS >and vertical applications (or, never been there) into a world not >necessarily requiring an operating system - on into a personal environment >where user's can manipulate objects for their own needs on any hardware. But having the ability to generate native looking doesn't mean we can't still build in Squeak in this way. In fact, we still have to *develop* this way. It is just that when we make a new "application" or update an older one, we press a "deploy" button and now we have a package that we can use with all the native package tools of the different operating systems. In other words, we can be on a high horse and say "no compromise! This is the future and you must take the whole or you can have nothing!" and everyone will continue to choose their less capable languages (except for web programming where we don't have this issue). Or we can reach out just a little and prove what we can do. I am not talking about something radical like getting source files. Not having source files is a big part of what gives Smalltalk it's advantage and I would never want to see that changed just to look more familiar. I would never want to change Smalltalk in any way just to look familiar. But I do care about playing well with others where it makes sense. And to me, an ability like this makes sense. Right now, if I made some cool application in Squeak what does the average user have to do to see it? They use their native app installer to get squeak, then they have to learn the Squeak interface to be able to use *our* app installer to finally get it. That puts us at a rather large disadvantage. Right now, people are doing this kind of packaging for stand alone applications anyway. Look at Sophie for example. And what about commercial apps? We want to support those right? If a vendor releases something for the desktop, it will be a stand alone app. But if we make the stand alone application generator, we can do anything we want. For example, we can have the default error handler to pop up a window to the user, much like MS windows does now, and give them an option to send a "bug report". The "bug report" would actually zip up the image, right where it is and mail it to the developer so when he runs it in his own image, he has the full debugger et al. to rapidly find and fix the problem. We can have the built in auto-update system just load a change set. Using the power of Smalltalk, our application can update itself while running. No application restarts for updates. >What we need is to convince Mr. Dell to sell computers with Squeak on it >and nothing else. That would be the ultimate. Squeak isn't ready to fit that roll, even if there was interest Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254 Email: bills(a)anest4.anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 846-1285 FAX: (352) 392-7029

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Re: Making Squeak more accessible and used - reversing the trend
by Bill Schwab 04 Feb '07

04 Feb '07

Brad, I want to "perpetuate" vertical apps because my users need them and therefore I need to create them. Communicating between them can be as simple as using sockets. Given that I have apps (vertical or otherwise) on geographically separated machines, that's pretty much a wash anyway. BTW, I get more than prototyping: I get the ability to profile/refactor/iterate until I have something that frequently out-performs a mainstream effort, and I get an OO system that can "tell me where it hurts" any time an error occurs. That's a lot of bang for the user's buck. In summary, I want to use Smalltalk, and like it or not, I will run on top of things like Windows, Mac OS or Linux for a long time to come. The question is whether or not Squeak is a candidate development platform. We seem to agree (to put it mildly<g>) about the level of cleanup that should occur in moving to 3.10. That's a start. Bill Brad Fuller brad at bradfuller.com Sun Feb 4 02:09:16 UTC 2007 > I continue to think the community is really missing the point on a few > fundamental topics. Some think the only route to success is to get > developers to use Squeak to churn out native-widget apps for end users; > others fire back with things like there should be no OS, no difference > between users and developers, and other idealistic beliefs. All are > bickering, to the detriment of Squeak. Gee... I haven't seen any bickering. I think the arguments have been fruitful and interesting. > > Our goal should be to collaborate on making both approaches, and others, > possible! Why would one want to continue to perpetuate the development of vertical applications - of which it is difficult to communicate between (except w/o even more vertical methods of communicating)? I see only one advantage of developing OS-native apps in Squeak and that's Smalltalk's prototyping ability. A capability that you can also get with other languages. Unfortunately, the user misses the true power of the Smalltalk environment. <text removed> > The modularization effort provides a wonderful opportunity to give > Squeak a frame-up restoration for 3.10 and beyond. I continue to hope > that we will take a collective deep breath and clean up the modules as > they go into the next image; now is the time. Amen Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254 Email: bills(a)anest4.anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 846-1285 FAX: (352) 392-7029

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code updates
by Ramiro Diaz Trepat 04 Feb '07

04 Feb '07

I just wanted to let you know that hitting the "load code updates" button on a freshly downloaded 3.9 image opens up an error window stating: "Please clean out Undeclared"

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[ANN] Monticello + HTTPS
by Philippe Marschall 04 Feb '07

04 Feb '07

Hi Thanks to the Curl Plugin [1] there is now a Monticello add-on that supports https [2]. Well actually it supports FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, FILE and LDAP (check the curl homepage [3] for a full list). It has not yet seen much testing, but it can commit itself to SqueakSource. A thing to note is that this is not a full Monticello version, it is just a new repository type so it should work well together with whatever custom Monticello you use. [1] http://www.squeaksource.com/CurlPlugin.html [2] http://www.squeaksource.com/monticellossl.html [3] http://curl.haxx.se/ Cheers Philippe

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Finding out how many displays attached to computer (Sophie? Ffenestri?)
by David Faught 04 Feb '07

04 Feb '07

Joshua Gargus wrote: >I want to use OSProcess to launch a VNC server. If multiple monitors >are attached to the computer, I want the VNC server to display the >monitor that Squeak is not on (I'll need to generate the appropriate >command-line argument from within Squeak). Has anyone (Sophie? >Ffenestri?) done any work to make Squeak aware of how many displays >are available, and which one Squeak is running on? > >The desired platforms are (in order of decreasing importance) >Windows, OS X, and Linux. I have used VNC server on a Windows machine with 2 displays with the desktop extended across both displays. When the VNC client attaches to this server, it gets a full desktop-size display, covering both displays from the server, within a scrollable window. I don't know if there is a way to change this behavior to do exactly what you want.

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Squeak Wiki Problem
by Alan Capewell 04 Feb '07

04 Feb '07

I keep getting http 502 errors when accessing the squeak wiki from work. Is anyone else experiencing problems? full error text looks like this Proxy Error The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request GET /. Reason: Error reading from remote server -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Squeak-Wiki-Problem-tf2940936.html#a8222984 Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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Load OmniBase in Squeak
by Sebastian Sastre 03 Feb '07

03 Feb '07

Hi there, how is supoused to load OmniBase in Squeak? I'm trying the versions in squeak map and squeaksource and both are failing to load on Squeak3.9-final-7067.image I'm missing something? Sebastian

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