Hi Stef --

5)- beAllFont:

Did the commentary in #font: help you understand the relationship between fonts, text attributes, and text style? The most basic usage is to set a #textStyle: and then use #contents: maybe just with a string, not text. If it is a text, text attributes will override the defaults coming from the current text style. #font: is expected to work very similar to what #beAllFont: did. Hmm....

The scale factor was by default initialized to 0.75 which made everything tiny; in 5.3 it was 1.0.

Hmm... What's the platform you are working on? This should never happen in 6.0. 75% is a special case that must be selected by the user. It is never used automatically...

Best, Marcel Am 25.08.2022 12:27:59 schrieb Stéphane Rollandin lecteur@zogotounga.net: Some notes about porting muO to 6.0

Context:

I always develop on a stable release, that may be several versions behind the current trunk. This makes updating everything to work on a newer stable release a non-trivial task, always.

muO started around 2002/2003, when Squeak was at 3. something (later and for a long time I worked on 3.8). I remember 3.8 to 3.9 being quite bad, but it was always nice to discover the new features and play with them. And now after twenty years muO has gone all the way to 6.0, which shows a real concern about backward compatibility from the trunk developers - so, thanks everybody!

Now all is not smooth and this time, moving from 5.1/5.3 to 6.0, I had the feeling it was more bumpy because of a few actual non-compatible changes. Their nature also made the corresponding porting issues particularly difficult to pinpoint, leading at times to the wrong but unsettling impression that something was deeply broken.

So here they are:

1)- becomeForward:

A lot of the intricate live dependency of interactive objects in muO was just gone - living things were now dead; it seems things were broken all over the place.

In fact it was just that #becomeForward: semantics had changed.

All my #becomeForward: calls had to be replaced with #becomeForward:copyHash: with second argument true.

This one is quite nasty.

2)- setProperty:toValue:

Debuggers showed me all kind of objects receiving messages they had nothing to do with. It seemed that object composition was scrambled, but in fact...

#setProperty:toValue: semantics had changed

It now returns its second argument, so I had to add cascaded #yourself calls in many places.

This one is nasty too.

3)- immutable arrays

In a couple of places I did use arrays written in their now immutable form to store data that would later be updated. I had to use other ways to instanciate the arrays.

This one is bad IMO. Not the fact that arrays can (and should most often) be immutable, but the fact the default way to write an #(array) or a 'string' now has a different semantics. Assuming as before that we get mutable objects leads to bugs that are easy to catch, but I am afraid there may be old code laying around in SqueakMap or other repositories that will now break. Well maybe I'm wrong about that.

4)- FloatArray

FloatArray is now abstract; it must now be replaced with Float32Array.

Because I want muO to load and work both in 5.3 and 6.0 (which it does), I had to to have the pre-installer create a dummy Float32Array class before loading the muO code in 5.3.

No big deal, but again if some older forgotten packages are using FloatArray, they will break.

5)- beAllFont:

This one is minor but still, #beAllFont: semantics changed. In 5.3 it used to update the font of an existing text morph, now it is the same as #font: and cannot be used that way - it must be sent before the text is set.

I just reverted it to its 5.3 behavior for muO.

6)- font sizes

In MuOTheme#addFonts: I had to give different font sizes numbers in 5.3 and 6.0 in order to get the same actual font sizes on screen. Not sure what happened there, I guess a bug was fixed (because the font support is much nicer now in 6.0) but still that's an incompatible change.

7)- RealEstateAgent scaleFactor

The scale factor was by default initialized to 0.75 which made everything tiny; in 5.3 it was 1.0.

8) minor stuff now fixed

There where other minor issues that were fixed in the update stream after I signaled them on squeak-dev. I'll just mention them for completeness sake:

- rehash was needed in SmartRefStream>>#next - #encompassing:, #merging: did not accept a Set anymore - a one-character wide TextMorph would not resize properly

All of this is now fine in 6.0, as of version 22110

All in all it was an interesting ride, and kudos to the developers for all the work that went into 6.0!

Stef

Thank you! Please disregard my request in the other email, as I read chronologically, I hadn't seen this yet. :)

On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 5:27 AM Stéphane Rollandin lecteur@zogotounga.net wrote:

Some notes about porting muO to 6.0

Context:

I always develop on a stable release, that may be several versions behind the current trunk. This makes updating everything to work on a newer stable release a non-trivial task, always.

muO started around 2002/2003, when Squeak was at 3. something (later and for a long time I worked on 3.8). I remember 3.8 to 3.9 being quite bad, but it was always nice to discover the new features and play with them. And now after twenty years muO has gone all the way to 6.0, which shows a real concern about backward compatibility from the trunk developers - so, thanks everybody!

Now all is not smooth and this time, moving from 5.1/5.3 to 6.0, I had the feeling it was more bumpy because of a few actual non-compatible changes. Their nature also made the corresponding porting issues particularly difficult to pinpoint, leading at times to the wrong but unsettling impression that something was deeply broken.

So here they are:

1)- becomeForward:

A lot of the intricate live dependency of interactive objects in muO was just gone - living things were now dead; it seems things were broken all over the place.

In fact it was just that #becomeForward: semantics had changed.

All my #becomeForward: calls had to be replaced with #becomeForward:copyHash: with second argument true.

This one is quite nasty.

2)- setProperty:toValue:

Debuggers showed me all kind of objects receiving messages they had nothing to do with. It seemed that object composition was scrambled, but in fact...

#setProperty:toValue: semantics had changed

It now returns its second argument, so I had to add cascaded #yourself calls in many places.

This one is nasty too.

3)- immutable arrays

In a couple of places I did use arrays written in their now immutable form to store data that would later be updated. I had to use other ways to instanciate the arrays.

This one is bad IMO. Not the fact that arrays can (and should most often) be immutable, but the fact the default way to write an #(array) or a 'string' now has a different semantics. Assuming as before that we get mutable objects leads to bugs that are easy to catch, but I am afraid there may be old code laying around in SqueakMap or other repositories that will now break. Well maybe I'm wrong about that.

4)- FloatArray

FloatArray is now abstract; it must now be replaced with Float32Array.

Because I want muO to load and work both in 5.3 and 6.0 (which it does), I had to to have the pre-installer create a dummy Float32Array class before loading the muO code in 5.3.

No big deal, but again if some older forgotten packages are using FloatArray, they will break.

5)- beAllFont:

This one is minor but still, #beAllFont: semantics changed. In 5.3 it used to update the font of an existing text morph, now it is the same as #font: and cannot be used that way - it must be sent before the text is set.

I just reverted it to its 5.3 behavior for muO.

6)- font sizes

In MuOTheme#addFonts: I had to give different font sizes numbers in 5.3 and 6.0 in order to get the same actual font sizes on screen. Not sure what happened there, I guess a bug was fixed (because the font support is much nicer now in 6.0) but still that's an incompatible change.

7)- RealEstateAgent scaleFactor

The scale factor was by default initialized to 0.75 which made everything tiny; in 5.3 it was 1.0.

8. minor stuff now fixed

There where other minor issues that were fixed in the update stream after I signaled them on squeak-dev. I'll just mention them for completeness sake:

    - rehash was needed in SmartRefStream>>#next
    - #encompassing:, #merging: did not accept a Set anymore
    - a one-character wide TextMorph would not resize properly

All of this is now fine in 6.0, as of version 22110

All in all it was an interesting ride, and kudos to the developers for all the work that went into 6.0!

Stef