hi,
On 24 Mar 2018, at 09:50, Cyril Ferlicot D. cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com wrote:
Le 23/03/2018 à 21:52, Eliot Miranda a écrit :
Hi Damien,
Indeed the image is corrupt at start-up. See below.
Right. This VM is prior to the bug fixes in VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320:
Spur: Fix a bad bug in SpurPlnningCompactor. unmarkObjectsFromFirstFreeObject, used when the compactor requires more than one pass due to insufficient savedFirstFieldsSpace, expects the corpse of a moved object to be unmarked, but copyAndUnmarkObject:to:bytes:firstField: only unmarked the target. Unmarking the corpse before the copy unmarks both. This fixes a crash with ReleaseBuilder class>>saveAsNewRelease when non-use of cacheDuring: creates lots of files, enough to push the system into the multi-pass regime.
Pharo urgently needs to upgrade the VM to one more up to date than 2017 08 27 (in fact more up-to-date than opensmalltalk/vm commit 0fe1e1ea108e53501a0e728736048062c83a66ce, Fri Jan 19 13:17:57 2018 -0800). The bug that VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320 fixes can result in image corruption in large images, and can occur (as it has here) at start-up, causing one's work to be irretrievably lost.
Hi Eliot,
I think that there is a lot of people who would like to get a newer stable vm for Pharo 6.1 and 7. The problem is that it is hard to know which VM are stable enough to be promoted as stable.
Some weeks ago Esteban tried to promote a VM as stable and he had to revert it the same day because a regression occurred in the VM.
If you're able to tell us which vms are stable in those present at http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ and http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ it would be a great help.
Even better would be for the pharo community to have a way to know which vms are stable or not without having to ask you.
there is no “stable” branch in Cog, and that’s a problem. “released” versions (the version you can find as stable) are not working for Pharo :(
I tried to promote versions from end feb and that crashed.
next week I will try again, maybe now they are stable enough… one thing is true: the versions that we consider stable (from oct/17) present problems that are already solved on latest.
Esteban
Have a nice day.
-- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot
-- Cyril Ferlicot https://ferlicot.fr
2018-03-24 11:11 GMT+01:00 Esteban Lorenzano estebanlm@gmail.com:
hi,
On 24 Mar 2018, at 09:50, Cyril Ferlicot D. cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com
wrote:
Le 23/03/2018 à 21:52, Eliot Miranda a écrit :
Hi Damien,
Indeed the image is corrupt at start-up. See below.
Right. This VM is prior to the bug fixes in VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320:
Spur: Fix a bad bug in SpurPlnningCompactor. unmarkObjectsFromFirstFreeObject, used when the compactor requires
more
than one pass due to insufficient savedFirstFieldsSpace, expects the corpse of a moved object to be unmarked, but copyAndUnmarkObject:to:bytes:firstField: only unmarked the target. Unmarking the corpse before the copy unmarks both. This fixes a crash with ReleaseBuilder class>>saveAsNewRelease when non-use of cacheDuring: creates lots of files, enough to push the system into the multi-pass
regime.
Pharo urgently needs to upgrade the VM to one more up to date than 2017 08 27 (in fact more up-to-date than opensmalltalk/vm commit 0fe1e1ea108e53501a0e728736048062c83a66ce, Fri Jan 19 13:17:57 2018 -0800). The bug that VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320 fixes can result in image corruption in large images, and can occur (as it has here) at start-up, causing one's work to be irretrievably lost.
Hi Eliot,
I think that there is a lot of people who would like to get a newer stable vm for Pharo 6.1 and 7. The problem is that it is hard to know which VM are stable enough to be promoted as stable.
Some weeks ago Esteban tried to promote a VM as stable and he had to revert it the same day because a regression occurred in the VM.
If you're able to tell us which vms are stable in those present at http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ and http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ it would be a great help.
Even better would be for the pharo community to have a way to know which vms are stable or not without having to ask you.
there is no “stable” branch in Cog, and that’s a problem. “released” versions (the version you can find as stable) are not working for Pharo :(
I tried to promote versions from end feb and that crashed.
next week I will try again, maybe now they are stable enough… one thing is true: the versions that we consider stable (from oct/17) present problems that are already solved on latest.
Esteban
Have a nice day.
-- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot
-- Cyril Ferlicot https://ferlicot.fr
Hi, Several problems are mixed here, let's try and decouple: - 1) there are ongoing development in the core of VM that may introduce some instability - 2) there are ongoing development in some plugins also - 3) there are infrastructure problems preventing to produce artifacts whatever the intrinsic stability of the VM
For 1) development happens in VMMaker, and we have to be relying on experts. Today that is Eliot and Clement. We all want 64bits VM, improved GC, improved become:, write barrier, ephemerons, threaded FFI calls and adaptive optimization. Pharo is relying on these progress, they are vital. IMO, we are reaching a good level of confidence, and I hope to see some VMMaker version blessed as stable pretty soon.
Instead of whining, the best we can do for reaching this state is help them by providing accurate bug reports and even better reproducible cases. Thanks to all who are working in this direction.
For 2) we had a few problems, but again this is for improving important features (SSL...) Much of the development happens in feature branches already. But since we are targetting so many platforms, and don't have automated tests that scale yet, we still need beta testers. We can discuss about the introduction of such beta features wrt release cycles, that will be a good thing. Ideally we should tend toward continuous integration and have very short cycles, but we're not yet there.
For 3) we had a lot of problems, like staled links, invalid credentials, evolution of the version of tools at automated build site, etc...
If we don't build the artifacts, then we can't even have a chance to test the stability of 1) and 2) We have to understand that 3) is absolutely vital.
May I remind that for a very long period last year, the build were broken due to lack of work at Pharo side. Fortunately, this has changed in 2018. Fabio has been working REALLY hard to improve 3), and without the help of Esteban,I don't think he could have reached the holy green build status. We will never thank them enough for that. This also shows that cooperation may pay.
But this is still very fragile. If we want to make progress, we should ask why it is so. We could analyze the regressions, and decide if the complexity is sustainable, or eventually drop some drag. We are chasing many hares by building the VM for Newspeak/Pharo/Squeak i386/x86_64/ARM Spur/Stack/V3 Sista/lowcode linux/Macosx/Windows ... If it happens that a fix vital for Pharo/Squeak does break Newspeak tests, then it slows down the progress... Maybe we would want to decouple a bit more the problems there too (they may come from some image side weakness).
Last two years I've also observed some work exclusively done in the Pharo fork of the opensmalltalk VM. This was counter productive. Work must be produced upstream, or it's wasted. I once thought that the Pharo fork could be the place for the pharo team to manage official stable versions. But I agree that this is too much duplicated work and would be very happy to see the work happen upstream too.
If you have constructive ideas that will help decoupling all these problems, we are all ear.
PS: i did not post this answer for avoiding sterile discussion, but since Phil asked...
On 30/03/2018 23:56, Nicolas Cellier wrote:
Hi, Several problems are mixed here, let's try and decouple:
- there are ongoing development in the core of VM that may introduce
some instability
- there are ongoing development in some plugins also
- there are infrastructure problems preventing to produce artifacts
whatever the intrinsic stability of the VM
For 1) development happens in VMMaker, and we have to be relying on experts. Today that is Eliot and Clement. We all want 64bits VM, improved GC, improved become:, write barrier, ephemerons, threaded FFI calls and adaptive optimization. Pharo is relying on these progress, they are vital. IMO, we are reaching a good level of confidence, and I hope to see some VMMaker version blessed as stable pretty soon.
Instead of whining, the best we can do for reaching this state is help them by providing accurate bug reports and even better reproducible cases. Thanks to all who are working in this direction.
For 2) we had a few problems, but again this is for improving important features (SSL...) Much of the development happens in feature branches already. But since we are targetting so many platforms, and don't have automated tests that scale yet, we still need beta testers. We can discuss about the introduction of such beta features wrt release cycles, that will be a good thing. Ideally we should tend toward continuous integration and have very short cycles, but we're not yet there.
For 3) we had a lot of problems, like staled links, invalid credentials, evolution of the version of tools at automated build site, etc...
If we don't build the artifacts, then we can't even have a chance to test the stability of 1) and 2) We have to understand that 3) is absolutely vital.
May I remind that for a very long period last year, the build were broken due to lack of work at Pharo side. Fortunately, this has changed in 2018. Fabio has been working REALLY hard to improve 3), and without the help of Esteban,I don't think he could have reached the holy green build status. We will never thank them enough for that. This also shows that cooperation may pay.
But this is still very fragile. If we want to make progress, we should ask why it is so. We could analyze the regressions, and decide if the complexity is sustainable, or eventually drop some drag. We are chasing many hares by building the VM for Newspeak/Pharo/Squeak i386/x86_64/ARM Spur/Stack/V3 Sista/lowcode linux/Macosx/Windows ... If it happens that a fix vital for Pharo/Squeak does break Newspeak tests, then it slows down the progress... Maybe we would want to decouple a bit more the problems there too (they may come from some image side weakness).
Last two years I've also observed some work exclusively done in the Pharo fork of the opensmalltalk VM. This was counter productive. Work must be produced upstream, or it's wasted. I once thought that the Pharo fork could be the place for the pharo team to manage official stable versions. But I agree that this is too much duplicated work and would be very happy to see the work happen upstream too.
If you have constructive ideas that will help decoupling all these problems, we are all ear.
PS: i did not post this answer for avoiding sterile discussion, but since Phil asked...
Hi Nicolas,
Thanks for this explanation. It's helpful for people like me who work only with the image side of Pharo and only begin to read the work done on the VM side. It's not always obvious what are really the problems when we do not know the exact situation and can sometime leads to misunderstanding.
If the community have some ideas on how to improve the current infrastructure but does not have the time to do it currently, maybe it could be good to list them on the github issue tracker with an "Infrastructure" tag? Like that if someone complains and is ready to help a little you can just send it the link of the issues tagged "Infrastructure".
On 30 Mar 2018, at 23:56, Nicolas Cellier nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com wrote:
2018-03-24 11:11 GMT+01:00 Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com mailto:estebanlm@gmail.com>:
hi,
On 24 Mar 2018, at 09:50, Cyril Ferlicot D. <cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com mailto:cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com> wrote:
Le 23/03/2018 à 21:52, Eliot Miranda a écrit :
Hi Damien,
Indeed the image is corrupt at start-up. See below.
Right. This VM is prior to the bug fixes in VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320:
Spur: Fix a bad bug in SpurPlnningCompactor. unmarkObjectsFromFirstFreeObject, used when the compactor requires more than one pass due to insufficient savedFirstFieldsSpace, expects the corpse of a moved object to be unmarked, but copyAndUnmarkObject:to:bytes:firstField: only unmarked the target. Unmarking the corpse before the copy unmarks both. This fixes a crash with ReleaseBuilder class>>saveAsNewRelease when non-use of cacheDuring: creates lots of files, enough to push the system into the multi-pass regime.
Pharo urgently needs to upgrade the VM to one more up to date than 2017 08 27 (in fact more up-to-date than opensmalltalk/vm commit 0fe1e1ea108e53501a0e728736048062c83a66ce, Fri Jan 19 13:17:57 2018 -0800). The bug that VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320 fixes can result in image corruption in large images, and can occur (as it has here) at start-up, causing one's work to be irretrievably lost.
Hi Eliot,
I think that there is a lot of people who would like to get a newer stable vm for Pharo 6.1 and 7. The problem is that it is hard to know which VM are stable enough to be promoted as stable.
Some weeks ago Esteban tried to promote a VM as stable and he had to revert it the same day because a regression occurred in the VM.
If you're able to tell us which vms are stable in those present at http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ and http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ it would be a great help.
Even better would be for the pharo community to have a way to know which vms are stable or not without having to ask you.
there is no “stable” branch in Cog, and that’s a problem. “released” versions (the version you can find as stable) are not working for Pharo :(
I tried to promote versions from end feb and that crashed.
next week I will try again, maybe now they are stable enough… one thing is true: the versions that we consider stable (from oct/17) present problems that are already solved on latest.
Esteban
Have a nice day.
-- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot
-- Cyril Ferlicot https://ferlicot.fr https://ferlicot.fr/
Hi, Several problems are mixed here, let's try and decouple:
- there are ongoing development in the core of VM that may introduce some instability
- there are ongoing development in some plugins also
- there are infrastructure problems preventing to produce artifacts whatever the intrinsic stability of the VM
you are right in all points, but for me this is a problem of process.
- we have no defined milestones so nobody knows if they can jump to help. - plugin development happens “by his own” and nobody knows what happens, why happens and how it happens. - infrastructure is not bad and a lot of efforts has been made to make it work. But code sources are scattered around the world and the only thing that reunites them is the hand of the one who generates the C sources.
IMHO, is this “disconnection” what causes most of the problems.
cheers, Esteban
For 1) development happens in VMMaker, and we have to be relying on experts. Today that is Eliot and Clement. We all want 64bits VM, improved GC, improved become:, write barrier, ephemerons, threaded FFI calls and adaptive optimization. Pharo is relying on these progress, they are vital. IMO, we are reaching a good level of confidence, and I hope to see some VMMaker version blessed as stable pretty soon.
Instead of whining, the best we can do for reaching this state is help them by providing accurate bug reports and even better reproducible cases. Thanks to all who are working in this direction.
For 2) we had a few problems, but again this is for improving important features (SSL...) Much of the development happens in feature branches already. But since we are targetting so many platforms, and don't have automated tests that scale yet, we still need beta testers. We can discuss about the introduction of such beta features wrt release cycles, that will be a good thing. Ideally we should tend toward continuous integration and have very short cycles, but we're not yet there.
For 3) we had a lot of problems, like staled links, invalid credentials, evolution of the version of tools at automated build site, etc...
If we don't build the artifacts, then we can't even have a chance to test the stability of 1) and 2) We have to understand that 3) is absolutely vital.
May I remind that for a very long period last year, the build were broken due to lack of work at Pharo side. Fortunately, this has changed in 2018. Fabio has been working REALLY hard to improve 3), and without the help of Esteban,I don't think he could have reached the holy green build status. We will never thank them enough for that. This also shows that cooperation may pay.
But this is still very fragile. If we want to make progress, we should ask why it is so. We could analyze the regressions, and decide if the complexity is sustainable, or eventually drop some drag. We are chasing many hares by building the VM for Newspeak/Pharo/Squeak i386/x86_64/ARM Spur/Stack/V3 Sista/lowcode linux/Macosx/Windows ... If it happens that a fix vital for Pharo/Squeak does break Newspeak tests, then it slows down the progress... Maybe we would want to decouple a bit more the problems there too (they may come from some image side weakness).
Last two years I've also observed some work exclusively done in the Pharo fork of the opensmalltalk VM. This was counter productive. Work must be produced upstream, or it's wasted.
This happened just once or twice. And it was because people were ignorant of “joint" so they continued contributing as before (and people were pointed to right place when we had the opportunity). And I disagree this was counterproductive because I took the effort to merge the changes into osvm. This worked fine until I stopped to do that job, but well… just one PR got stalled there for months and Alistair integrated it recently.
What *did happen* and I’m still not ready to let it go is a lot of the small changes that we presented to be rejected (or ignored) without further consideration. But well, let’s keep it positive and not enter to sterile discussions, I just think you are wrong with this argument.
cheers, Esteban
I once thought that the Pharo fork could be the place for the pharo team to manage official stable versions. But I agree that this is too much duplicated work and would be very happy to see the work happen upstream too.
If you have constructive ideas that will help decoupling all these problems, we are all ear.
PS: i did not post this answer for avoiding sterile discussion, but since Phil asked...
Hi all, Esteban, one thing we can do is to add a job to the Pharo CI to try to perform the bootstrap and testing of it using the latest VM. This of course will no replace manual testing but it can give us the result of running a quite complex process using the latest VM. Even more, the last problems with stability were detected when trying to execute a complete bootstrap.
Today I will make a pull request (to never be integrated) using the latest VM instead of the stable one. Later we can migrate it to be an independent job, that is always there to validate the new latest VM. Moreover, if the VM is published using a kind of semantic versioning, we can refer to an specific VM in the bootstrap process. This will allow us to check new VMs just with a PR (taking advance of all the automatic process that now is working) and also to reproduce the building using the exact VM used during the generation of an image, this is a weak point we have today, where we all always using Stable, and not a defined version.
Cheers,
On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 3:03 PM, Esteban Lorenzano estebanlm@gmail.com wrote:
On 30 Mar 2018, at 23:56, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@ gmail.com> wrote:
2018-03-24 11:11 GMT+01:00 Esteban Lorenzano estebanlm@gmail.com:
hi,
On 24 Mar 2018, at 09:50, Cyril Ferlicot D. cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com
wrote:
Le 23/03/2018 à 21:52, Eliot Miranda a écrit :
Hi Damien,
Indeed the image is corrupt at start-up. See below.
Right. This VM is prior to the bug fixes in VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320:
Spur: Fix a bad bug in SpurPlnningCompactor. unmarkObjectsFromFirstFreeObject, used when the compactor requires
more
than one pass due to insufficient savedFirstFieldsSpace, expects the corpse of a moved object to be unmarked, but copyAndUnmarkObject:to:bytes:firstField: only unmarked the target. Unmarking the corpse before the copy unmarks both. This fixes a crash with ReleaseBuilder class>>saveAsNewRelease when non-use of
cacheDuring:
creates lots of files, enough to push the system into the multi-pass
regime.
Pharo urgently needs to upgrade the VM to one more up to date than 2017 08 27 (in fact more up-to-date than opensmalltalk/vm commit 0fe1e1ea108e53501a0e728736048062c83a66ce, Fri Jan 19 13:17:57 2018 -0800). The bug that VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320 fixes can result in image corruption in large images, and can occur (as it has here) at start-up, causing one's work to be irretrievably lost.
Hi Eliot,
I think that there is a lot of people who would like to get a newer stable vm for Pharo 6.1 and 7. The problem is that it is hard to know which VM are stable enough to be promoted as stable.
Some weeks ago Esteban tried to promote a VM as stable and he had to revert it the same day because a regression occurred in the VM.
If you're able to tell us which vms are stable in those present at http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ and http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ it would be a great help.
Even better would be for the pharo community to have a way to know which vms are stable or not without having to ask you.
there is no “stable” branch in Cog, and that’s a problem. “released” versions (the version you can find as stable) are not working for Pharo :(
I tried to promote versions from end feb and that crashed.
next week I will try again, maybe now they are stable enough… one thing is true: the versions that we consider stable (from oct/17) present problems that are already solved on latest.
Esteban
Have a nice day.
-- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot
-- Cyril Ferlicot https://ferlicot.fr
Hi, Several problems are mixed here, let's try and decouple:
- there are ongoing development in the core of VM that may introduce
some instability
- there are ongoing development in some plugins also
- there are infrastructure problems preventing to produce artifacts
whatever the intrinsic stability of the VM
you are right in all points, but for me this is a problem of process.
- we have no defined milestones so nobody knows if they can jump to help.
- plugin development happens “by his own” and nobody knows what happens,
why happens and how it happens.
- infrastructure is not bad and a lot of efforts has been made to make it
work. But code sources are scattered around the world and the only thing that reunites them is the hand of the one who generates the C sources.
IMHO, is this “disconnection” what causes most of the problems.
cheers, Esteban
For 1) development happens in VMMaker, and we have to be relying on experts. Today that is Eliot and Clement. We all want 64bits VM, improved GC, improved become:, write barrier, ephemerons, threaded FFI calls and adaptive optimization. Pharo is relying on these progress, they are vital. IMO, we are reaching a good level of confidence, and I hope to see some VMMaker version blessed as stable pretty soon.
Instead of whining, the best we can do for reaching this state is help them by providing accurate bug reports and even better reproducible cases. Thanks to all who are working in this direction.
For 2) we had a few problems, but again this is for improving important features (SSL...) Much of the development happens in feature branches already. But since we are targetting so many platforms, and don't have automated tests that scale yet, we still need beta testers. We can discuss about the introduction of such beta features wrt release cycles, that will be a good thing. Ideally we should tend toward continuous integration and have very short cycles, but we're not yet there.
For 3) we had a lot of problems, like staled links, invalid credentials, evolution of the version of tools at automated build site, etc...
If we don't build the artifacts, then we can't even have a chance to test the stability of 1) and 2) We have to understand that 3) is absolutely vital.
May I remind that for a very long period last year, the build were broken due to lack of work at Pharo side. Fortunately, this has changed in 2018. Fabio has been working REALLY hard to improve 3), and without the help of Esteban,I don't think he could have reached the holy green build status. We will never thank them enough for that. This also shows that cooperation may pay.
But this is still very fragile. If we want to make progress, we should ask why it is so. We could analyze the regressions, and decide if the complexity is sustainable, or eventually drop some drag. We are chasing many hares by building the VM for Newspeak/Pharo/Squeak i386/x86_64/ARM Spur/Stack/V3 Sista/lowcode linux/Macosx/Windows ... If it happens that a fix vital for Pharo/Squeak does break Newspeak tests, then it slows down the progress... Maybe we would want to decouple a bit more the problems there too (they may come from some image side weakness).
Last two years I've also observed some work exclusively done in the Pharo fork of the opensmalltalk VM. This was counter productive. Work must be produced upstream, or it's wasted.
This happened just once or twice. And it was because people were ignorant of “joint" so they continued contributing as before (and people were pointed to right place when we had the opportunity). And I disagree this was counterproductive because I took the effort to merge the changes into osvm. This worked fine until I stopped to do that job, but well… just one PR got stalled there for months and Alistair integrated it recently.
What *did happen* and I’m still not ready to let it go is a lot of the small changes that we presented to be rejected (or ignored) without further consideration. But well, let’s keep it positive and not enter to sterile discussions, I just think you are wrong with this argument.
cheers, Esteban
I once thought that the Pharo fork could be the place for the pharo team to manage official stable versions. But I agree that this is too much duplicated work and would be very happy to see the work happen upstream too.
If you have constructive ideas that will help decoupling all these problems, we are all ear.
PS: i did not post this answer for avoiding sterile discussion, but since Phil asked...
2018-03-31 15:03 GMT+02:00 Esteban Lorenzano estebanlm@gmail.com:
On 30 Mar 2018, at 23:56, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@ gmail.com> wrote:
2018-03-24 11:11 GMT+01:00 Esteban Lorenzano estebanlm@gmail.com:
hi,
On 24 Mar 2018, at 09:50, Cyril Ferlicot D. cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com
wrote:
Le 23/03/2018 à 21:52, Eliot Miranda a écrit :
Hi Damien,
Indeed the image is corrupt at start-up. See below.
Right. This VM is prior to the bug fixes in VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320:
Spur: Fix a bad bug in SpurPlnningCompactor. unmarkObjectsFromFirstFreeObject, used when the compactor requires
more
than one pass due to insufficient savedFirstFieldsSpace, expects the corpse of a moved object to be unmarked, but copyAndUnmarkObject:to:bytes:firstField: only unmarked the target. Unmarking the corpse before the copy unmarks both. This fixes a crash with ReleaseBuilder class>>saveAsNewRelease when non-use of
cacheDuring:
creates lots of files, enough to push the system into the multi-pass
regime.
Pharo urgently needs to upgrade the VM to one more up to date than 2017 08 27 (in fact more up-to-date than opensmalltalk/vm commit 0fe1e1ea108e53501a0e728736048062c83a66ce, Fri Jan 19 13:17:57 2018 -0800). The bug that VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320 fixes can result in image corruption in large images, and can occur (as it has here) at start-up, causing one's work to be irretrievably lost.
Hi Eliot,
I think that there is a lot of people who would like to get a newer stable vm for Pharo 6.1 and 7. The problem is that it is hard to know which VM are stable enough to be promoted as stable.
Some weeks ago Esteban tried to promote a VM as stable and he had to revert it the same day because a regression occurred in the VM.
If you're able to tell us which vms are stable in those present at http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ and http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ it would be a great help.
Even better would be for the pharo community to have a way to know which vms are stable or not without having to ask you.
there is no “stable” branch in Cog, and that’s a problem. “released” versions (the version you can find as stable) are not working for Pharo :(
I tried to promote versions from end feb and that crashed.
next week I will try again, maybe now they are stable enough… one thing is true: the versions that we consider stable (from oct/17) present problems that are already solved on latest.
Esteban
Have a nice day.
-- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot
-- Cyril Ferlicot https://ferlicot.fr
Hi, Several problems are mixed here, let's try and decouple:
- there are ongoing development in the core of VM that may introduce
some instability
- there are ongoing development in some plugins also
- there are infrastructure problems preventing to produce artifacts
whatever the intrinsic stability of the VM
you are right in all points, but for me this is a problem of process.
- we have no defined milestones so nobody knows if they can jump to help.
- plugin development happens “by his own” and nobody knows what happens,
why happens and how it happens.
- infrastructure is not bad and a lot of efforts has been made to make it
work. But code sources are scattered around the world and the only thing that reunites them is the hand of the one who generates the C sources.
IMHO, is this “disconnection” what causes most of the problems.
cheers, Esteban
Hi Esteban, I see no fatality, and github also provides tools for that. Look, there is the project page on github https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/projects/1
Maybe the Pharo team is willing to collaborate and take active parts in definition of milestones?
For 1) development happens in VMMaker, and we have to be relying on experts. Today that is Eliot and Clement. We all want 64bits VM, improved GC, improved become:, write barrier, ephemerons, threaded FFI calls and adaptive optimization. Pharo is relying on these progress, they are vital. IMO, we are reaching a good level of confidence, and I hope to see some VMMaker version blessed as stable pretty soon.
Instead of whining, the best we can do for reaching this state is help them by providing accurate bug reports and even better reproducible cases. Thanks to all who are working in this direction.
For 2) we had a few problems, but again this is for improving important features (SSL...) Much of the development happens in feature branches already. But since we are targetting so many platforms, and don't have automated tests that scale yet, we still need beta testers. We can discuss about the introduction of such beta features wrt release cycles, that will be a good thing. Ideally we should tend toward continuous integration and have very short cycles, but we're not yet there.
For 3) we had a lot of problems, like staled links, invalid credentials, evolution of the version of tools at automated build site, etc...
If we don't build the artifacts, then we can't even have a chance to test the stability of 1) and 2) We have to understand that 3) is absolutely vital.
May I remind that for a very long period last year, the build were broken due to lack of work at Pharo side. Fortunately, this has changed in 2018. Fabio has been working REALLY hard to improve 3), and without the help of Esteban,I don't think he could have reached the holy green build status. We will never thank them enough for that. This also shows that cooperation may pay.
But this is still very fragile. If we want to make progress, we should ask why it is so. We could analyze the regressions, and decide if the complexity is sustainable, or eventually drop some drag. We are chasing many hares by building the VM for Newspeak/Pharo/Squeak i386/x86_64/ARM Spur/Stack/V3 Sista/lowcode linux/Macosx/Windows ... If it happens that a fix vital for Pharo/Squeak does break Newspeak tests, then it slows down the progress... Maybe we would want to decouple a bit more the problems there too (they may come from some image side weakness).
Last two years I've also observed some work exclusively done in the Pharo fork of the opensmalltalk VM. This was counter productive. Work must be produced upstream, or it's wasted.
This happened just once or twice. And it was because people were ignorant of “joint" so they continued contributing as before (and people were pointed to right place when we had the opportunity). And I disagree this was counterproductive because I took the effort to merge the changes into osvm. This worked fine until I stopped to do that job, but well… just one PR got stalled there for months and Alistair integrated it recently.
What *did happen* and I’m still not ready to let it go is a lot of the small changes that we presented to be rejected (or ignored) without further consideration. But well, let’s keep it positive and not enter to sterile discussions, I just think you are wrong with this argument.
No, it's important, we (opensmalltalk-vm team) can't let such bad feeling
and frustration creep in. Every contribution counts, that does not mean that every PR will be accepted, but we owe an explanation if not. Some are accepted instantly, some are accepted after modification requests, some are rejected (I hope with some rationalization). What is problematic is that some were ignored for too long time, I regret the situation, but there is no deliberate intention to ignore them, just lack of manpower IMO. For example, the recent work of Alistair shows that there is no fatality here, it's just that someone has to do the hard work (kudos!).
Also, the question is coupled with stability: having a red status does not help, for almost every PR that I accepted, I had to dig into travis console reports and compare to status of previous build in order to know if it was a regression, or just a long time failing case... This does not scale!
I'm all for more distributed power, and that should come with responsibilities, first a cooperative "you break it, you fix it" attitude.
Or maybe do you want clarified decision process? For now, people that feel interested by a PR raise their voice. I don't know if we need something more formal For important design decisions there is vm-dev mailing list to discuss about that.
cheers Nicolas
cheers, Esteban
I once thought that the Pharo fork could be the place for the pharo team to manage official stable versions. But I agree that this is too much duplicated work and would be very happy to see the work happen upstream too.
If you have constructive ideas that will help decoupling all these problems, we are all ear.
PS: i did not post this answer for avoiding sterile discussion, but since Phil asked...
hi,
On 31 Mar 2018, at 17:34, Nicolas Cellier nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com wrote:
2018-03-31 15:03 GMT+02:00 Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com mailto:estebanlm@gmail.com>:
On 30 Mar 2018, at 23:56, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com mailto:nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com> wrote:
2018-03-24 11:11 GMT+01:00 Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com mailto:estebanlm@gmail.com>:
hi,
On 24 Mar 2018, at 09:50, Cyril Ferlicot D. <cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com mailto:cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com> wrote:
Le 23/03/2018 à 21:52, Eliot Miranda a écrit :
Hi Damien,
Indeed the image is corrupt at start-up. See below.
Right. This VM is prior to the bug fixes in VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320:
Spur: Fix a bad bug in SpurPlnningCompactor. unmarkObjectsFromFirstFreeObject, used when the compactor requires more than one pass due to insufficient savedFirstFieldsSpace, expects the corpse of a moved object to be unmarked, but copyAndUnmarkObject:to:bytes:firstField: only unmarked the target. Unmarking the corpse before the copy unmarks both. This fixes a crash with ReleaseBuilder class>>saveAsNewRelease when non-use of cacheDuring: creates lots of files, enough to push the system into the multi-pass regime.
Pharo urgently needs to upgrade the VM to one more up to date than 2017 08 27 (in fact more up-to-date than opensmalltalk/vm commit 0fe1e1ea108e53501a0e728736048062c83a66ce, Fri Jan 19 13:17:57 2018 -0800). The bug that VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320 fixes can result in image corruption in large images, and can occur (as it has here) at start-up, causing one's work to be irretrievably lost.
Hi Eliot,
I think that there is a lot of people who would like to get a newer stable vm for Pharo 6.1 and 7. The problem is that it is hard to know which VM are stable enough to be promoted as stable.
Some weeks ago Esteban tried to promote a VM as stable and he had to revert it the same day because a regression occurred in the VM.
If you're able to tell us which vms are stable in those present at http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ and http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ it would be a great help.
Even better would be for the pharo community to have a way to know which vms are stable or not without having to ask you.
there is no “stable” branch in Cog, and that’s a problem. “released” versions (the version you can find as stable) are not working for Pharo :(
I tried to promote versions from end feb and that crashed.
next week I will try again, maybe now they are stable enough… one thing is true: the versions that we consider stable (from oct/17) present problems that are already solved on latest.
Esteban
Have a nice day.
-- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot
-- Cyril Ferlicot https://ferlicot.fr https://ferlicot.fr/
Hi, Several problems are mixed here, let's try and decouple:
- there are ongoing development in the core of VM that may introduce some instability
- there are ongoing development in some plugins also
- there are infrastructure problems preventing to produce artifacts whatever the intrinsic stability of the VM
you are right in all points, but for me this is a problem of process.
- we have no defined milestones so nobody knows if they can jump to help.
- plugin development happens “by his own” and nobody knows what happens, why happens and how it happens.
- infrastructure is not bad and a lot of efforts has been made to make it work. But code sources are scattered around the world and the only thing that reunites them is the hand of the one who generates the C sources.
IMHO, is this “disconnection” what causes most of the problems.
cheers, Esteban
Hi Esteban, I see no fatality, and github also provides tools for that. Look, there is the project page on github https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/projects/1 https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/projects/1
Maybe the Pharo team is willing to collaborate and take active parts in definition of milestones?
For 1) development happens in VMMaker, and we have to be relying on experts. Today that is Eliot and Clement. We all want 64bits VM, improved GC, improved become:, write barrier, ephemerons, threaded FFI calls and adaptive optimization. Pharo is relying on these progress, they are vital. IMO, we are reaching a good level of confidence, and I hope to see some VMMaker version blessed as stable pretty soon.
Instead of whining, the best we can do for reaching this state is help them by providing accurate bug reports and even better reproducible cases. Thanks to all who are working in this direction.
For 2) we had a few problems, but again this is for improving important features (SSL...) Much of the development happens in feature branches already. But since we are targetting so many platforms, and don't have automated tests that scale yet, we still need beta testers. We can discuss about the introduction of such beta features wrt release cycles, that will be a good thing. Ideally we should tend toward continuous integration and have very short cycles, but we're not yet there.
For 3) we had a lot of problems, like staled links, invalid credentials, evolution of the version of tools at automated build site, etc...
If we don't build the artifacts, then we can't even have a chance to test the stability of 1) and 2) We have to understand that 3) is absolutely vital.
May I remind that for a very long period last year, the build were broken due to lack of work at Pharo side. Fortunately, this has changed in 2018. Fabio has been working REALLY hard to improve 3), and without the help of Esteban,I don't think he could have reached the holy green build status. We will never thank them enough for that. This also shows that cooperation may pay.
But this is still very fragile. If we want to make progress, we should ask why it is so. We could analyze the regressions, and decide if the complexity is sustainable, or eventually drop some drag. We are chasing many hares by building the VM for Newspeak/Pharo/Squeak i386/x86_64/ARM Spur/Stack/V3 Sista/lowcode linux/Macosx/Windows ... If it happens that a fix vital for Pharo/Squeak does break Newspeak tests, then it slows down the progress... Maybe we would want to decouple a bit more the problems there too (they may come from some image side weakness).
Last two years I've also observed some work exclusively done in the Pharo fork of the opensmalltalk VM. This was counter productive. Work must be produced upstream, or it's wasted.
This happened just once or twice. And it was because people were ignorant of “joint" so they continued contributing as before (and people were pointed to right place when we had the opportunity). And I disagree this was counterproductive because I took the effort to merge the changes into osvm. This worked fine until I stopped to do that job, but well… just one PR got stalled there for months and Alistair integrated it recently.
What *did happen* and I’m still not ready to let it go is a lot of the small changes that we presented to be rejected (or ignored) without further consideration. But well, let’s keep it positive and not enter to sterile discussions, I just think you are wrong with this argument.
No, it's important, we (opensmalltalk-vm team) can't let such bad feeling and frustration creep in. Every contribution counts, that does not mean that every PR will be accepted, but we owe an explanation if not. Some are accepted instantly, some are accepted after modification requests, some are rejected (I hope with some rationalization). What is problematic is that some were ignored for too long time, I regret the situation, but there is no deliberate intention to ignore them, just lack of manpower IMO. For example, the recent work of Alistair shows that there is no fatality here, it's just that someone has to do the hard work (kudos!).
I’m sorry for have a bitter feeling, but I’m going to give you an example so you understand why I’m saying this: I proposed the refactor of Alien package (which is obviously right and simple) at least three times in last three years (by different means). First time I’ve been told “no, we prefer it like that”. Second time I’ve been told “we need to think about that” (and no answer later). Last time I even didn’t receive a response. So well, when Torsten proposed it he first came to me. I told him “talk in vm-dev and good luck”. His proposal was accepted (thanks god). Several situations like this one made me think that I’m a second class citizen in this community. And you know what? I’m 46 years and I do not want to be treated as is I’m a child that can play with the toys someone let me or not. So yes, I’m sad and not very “into” this this days. I made a lot of efforts to came back for the de facto fork we had because I always pushed to work together. But I do not see the spirit of collaboration I hoped.
Also, the question is coupled with stability: having a red status does not help, for almost every PR that I accepted, I had to dig into travis console reports and compare to status of previous build in order to know if it was a regression, or just a long time failing case... This does not scale!
is worst that "does not scale". again, let me put you an example: Imagine I want to work on FFI and I need to touch both an external file and VMMaker: I cannot do a PR because VMMaker is not there and VM building will be broken and I cannot push VMMaker because platform sources are not there and VM building will be broken too. So, the only solution is what happens today: I need to push VMMaker and changes at the same time. So I’m forced to work on the development branch (we are all forced to work there), instead how I think it should be: each one should be able to work on their branch and contribute changes through PRs (PRs that can be validated with a good CI process).
As a consequence, since all contributions go to the development branch… we have no stability and we need to wait of the blessing of a VM. That may or may not happen.
Meh, whatever… is obvious that my way of work is different to most of the people of this community so I will go back to what I do now: just the absolutely necessary.
cheers, Esteban
ps: I will not continue discussing this… I know how things are and I’m sorry to put such a negative perspective in this list, but I needed to say it.
I'm all for more distributed power, and that should come with responsibilities, first a cooperative "you break it, you fix it" attitude.
Or maybe do you want clarified decision process? For now, people that feel interested by a PR raise their voice. I don't know if we need something more formal For important design decisions there is vm-dev mailing list to discuss about that.
cheers Nicolas
cheers, Esteban
I once thought that the Pharo fork could be the place for the pharo team to manage official stable versions. But I agree that this is too much duplicated work and would be very happy to see the work happen upstream too.
If you have constructive ideas that will help decoupling all these problems, we are all ear.
PS: i did not post this answer for avoiding sterile discussion, but since Phil asked...
2018-03-31 20:36 GMT+02:00 Esteban Lorenzano estebanlm@gmail.com:
hi,
On 31 Mar 2018, at 17:34, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@ gmail.com> wrote:
2018-03-31 15:03 GMT+02:00 Esteban Lorenzano estebanlm@gmail.com:
On 30 Mar 2018, at 23:56, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmai l.com> wrote:
2018-03-24 11:11 GMT+01:00 Esteban Lorenzano estebanlm@gmail.com:
hi,
On 24 Mar 2018, at 09:50, Cyril Ferlicot D. cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com
wrote:
Le 23/03/2018 à 21:52, Eliot Miranda a écrit :
Hi Damien,
Indeed the image is corrupt at start-up. See below.
Right. This VM is prior to the bug fixes in VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320:
Spur: Fix a bad bug in SpurPlnningCompactor. unmarkObjectsFromFirstFreeObject, used when the compactor requires
more
than one pass due to insufficient savedFirstFieldsSpace, expects the corpse of a moved object to be unmarked, but copyAndUnmarkObject:to:bytes:firstField: only unmarked the target. Unmarking the corpse before the copy unmarks both. This fixes a crash with ReleaseBuilder class>>saveAsNewRelease when non-use of
cacheDuring:
creates lots of files, enough to push the system into the multi-pass
regime.
Pharo urgently needs to upgrade the VM to one more up to date than
2017
08 27 (in fact more up-to-date than opensmalltalk/vm commit 0fe1e1ea108e53501a0e728736048062c83a66ce, Fri Jan 19 13:17:57 2018 -0800). The bug that VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320 fixes can result in image corruption in large images, and can occur (as it has here) at
start-up,
causing one's work to be irretrievably lost.
Hi Eliot,
I think that there is a lot of people who would like to get a newer stable vm for Pharo 6.1 and 7. The problem is that it is hard to know which VM are stable enough to be promoted as stable.
Some weeks ago Esteban tried to promote a VM as stable and he had to revert it the same day because a regression occurred in the VM.
If you're able to tell us which vms are stable in those present at http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ and http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ it would be a great help.
Even better would be for the pharo community to have a way to know
which
vms are stable or not without having to ask you.
there is no “stable” branch in Cog, and that’s a problem. “released” versions (the version you can find as stable) are not working for Pharo :(
I tried to promote versions from end feb and that crashed.
next week I will try again, maybe now they are stable enough… one thing is true: the versions that we consider stable (from oct/17) present problems that are already solved on latest.
Esteban
Have a nice day.
-- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot
-- Cyril Ferlicot https://ferlicot.fr
Hi, Several problems are mixed here, let's try and decouple:
- there are ongoing development in the core of VM that may introduce
some instability
- there are ongoing development in some plugins also
- there are infrastructure problems preventing to produce artifacts
whatever the intrinsic stability of the VM
you are right in all points, but for me this is a problem of process.
- we have no defined milestones so nobody knows if they can jump to help.
- plugin development happens “by his own” and nobody knows what happens,
why happens and how it happens.
- infrastructure is not bad and a lot of efforts has been made to make it
work. But code sources are scattered around the world and the only thing that reunites them is the hand of the one who generates the C sources.
IMHO, is this “disconnection” what causes most of the problems.
cheers, Esteban
Hi Esteban, I see no fatality, and github also provides tools for that. Look, there is the project page on github https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/projects/1
Maybe the Pharo team is willing to collaborate and take active parts in definition of milestones?
For 1) development happens in VMMaker, and we have to be relying on experts. Today that is Eliot and Clement. We all want 64bits VM, improved GC, improved become:, write barrier, ephemerons, threaded FFI calls and adaptive optimization. Pharo is relying on these progress, they are vital. IMO, we are reaching a good level of confidence, and I hope to see some VMMaker version blessed as stable pretty soon.
Instead of whining, the best we can do for reaching this state is help them by providing accurate bug reports and even better reproducible cases. Thanks to all who are working in this direction.
For 2) we had a few problems, but again this is for improving important features (SSL...) Much of the development happens in feature branches already. But since we are targetting so many platforms, and don't have automated tests that scale yet, we still need beta testers. We can discuss about the introduction of such beta features wrt release cycles, that will be a good thing. Ideally we should tend toward continuous integration and have very short cycles, but we're not yet there.
For 3) we had a lot of problems, like staled links, invalid credentials, evolution of the version of tools at automated build site, etc...
If we don't build the artifacts, then we can't even have a chance to test the stability of 1) and 2) We have to understand that 3) is absolutely vital.
May I remind that for a very long period last year, the build were broken due to lack of work at Pharo side. Fortunately, this has changed in 2018. Fabio has been working REALLY hard to improve 3), and without the help of Esteban,I don't think he could have reached the holy green build status. We will never thank them enough for that. This also shows that cooperation may pay.
But this is still very fragile. If we want to make progress, we should ask why it is so. We could analyze the regressions, and decide if the complexity is sustainable, or eventually drop some drag. We are chasing many hares by building the VM for Newspeak/Pharo/Squeak i386/x86_64/ARM Spur/Stack/V3 Sista/lowcode linux/Macosx/Windows ... If it happens that a fix vital for Pharo/Squeak does break Newspeak tests, then it slows down the progress... Maybe we would want to decouple a bit more the problems there too (they may come from some image side weakness).
Last two years I've also observed some work exclusively done in the Pharo fork of the opensmalltalk VM. This was counter productive. Work must be produced upstream, or it's wasted.
This happened just once or twice. And it was because people were ignorant of “joint" so they continued contributing as before (and people were pointed to right place when we had the opportunity). And I disagree this was counterproductive because I took the effort to merge the changes into osvm. This worked fine until I stopped to do that job, but well… just one PR got stalled there for months and Alistair integrated it recently.
What *did happen* and I’m still not ready to let it go is a lot of the small changes that we presented to be rejected (or ignored) without further consideration. But well, let’s keep it positive and not enter to sterile discussions, I just think you are wrong with this argument.
No, it's important, we (opensmalltalk-vm team) can't let such bad feeling
and frustration creep in. Every contribution counts, that does not mean that every PR will be accepted, but we owe an explanation if not. Some are accepted instantly, some are accepted after modification requests, some are rejected (I hope with some rationalization). What is problematic is that some were ignored for too long time, I regret the situation, but there is no deliberate intention to ignore them, just lack of manpower IMO. For example, the recent work of Alistair shows that there is no fatality here, it's just that someone has to do the hard work (kudos!).
I’m sorry for have a bitter feeling, but I’m going to give you an example so you understand why I’m saying this: I proposed the refactor of Alien package (which is obviously right and simple) at least three times in last three years (by different means). First time I’ve been told “no, we prefer it like that”. Second time I’ve been told “we need to think about that” (and no answer later). Last time I even didn’t receive a response. So well, when Torsten proposed it he first came to me. I told him “talk in vm-dev and good luck”. His proposal was accepted (thanks god). Several situations like this one made me think that I’m a second class citizen in this community. And you know what? I’m 46 years and I do not want to be treated as is I’m a child that can play with the toys someone let me or not. So yes, I’m sad and not very “into” this this days. I made a lot of efforts to came back for the de facto fork we had because I always pushed to work together. But I do not see the spirit of collaboration I hoped.
Torsten has brought the technical merits of doing so, and the cons of
status quo, it was nothing personnal. I don't know how the topic was brought on vm-dev. at that time. Probably the technical merit was not perceived then. For me, you are in the opensmalltalk team, this does not mean 2nd zone (or the whole Smalltalk community is second zone then).
Also, the question is coupled with stability: having a red status does not
help, for almost every PR that I accepted, I had to dig into travis console reports and compare to status of previous build in order to know if it was a regression, or just a long time failing case... This does not scale!
is worst that "does not scale". again, let me put you an example: Imagine I want to work on FFI and I need to touch both an external file and VMMaker: I cannot do a PR because VMMaker is not there and VM building will be broken and I cannot push VMMaker because platform sources are not there and VM building will be broken too. So, the only solution is what happens today: I need to push VMMaker and changes at the same time. So I’m forced to work on the development branch (we are all forced to work there), instead how I think it should be: each one should be able to work on their branch and contribute changes through PRs (PRs that can be validated with a good CI process).
As a consequence, since all contributions go to the development branch… we have no stability and we need to wait of the blessing of a VM. That may or may not happen.
Meh, whatever… is obvious that my way of work is different to most of the people of this community so I will go back to what I do now: just the absolutely necessary.
It's not at all about my way or your way, you don't have to make it
something personal. It' about the feasibility and sustainability of the different solutions. You are right, branch development is not compatible with versionning of generated code because it leads to unsolvable merge conflicts. So you legitimately raise the question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/893913/should-i-store-generated-code-in-... Whatever diverging opinions, the very first condition for automating code generation is to have reproducible artifacts (generated code). You know that it's not the case today, even if generating twice from the very same image. We can't shove this problem under the carpet. Otherwise, two different build of the same source could lead to different VM behavior, which would be worse than what we have today.
Beside, except Eliot, Clement and Ronaldo, most developers work on plugins. Developping plugins in branches is still possible, unlike core VM. There is a reduced probability of conflict of gnerated code given the number of concurrent developpers today. So we commit in trunk more often than strictly necessary IMO.
Finally, the case you are describing is rare and mostly concern modification of core VM. As said in other thread, dev cycle of core VM feature is long anyway (6+ month). In this context, feature branch are not sustainable. A good branch is a short branch, everything else is illusory and leads to merge nightmares. In such conditions, one have to accept temporary unstability and organize release cycles with stabilisation phase. How differently does the Pharo release cycle works? You have raised good points concerning the organization of those cycles. My answer does not change: take your place, throw inferiority complex away and participate. You are very capable, and it will be beneficial to the community at large.
And don't take this answer as advocacy for the status quo. I'm trying to analyze and identify locks. It does not mean that we can't unlock :)
cheers Nicolas
cheers,
Esteban
ps: I will not continue discussing this… I know how things are and I’m sorry to put such a negative perspective in this list, but I needed to say it.
I'm all for more distributed power, and that should come with responsibilities, first a cooperative "you break it, you fix it" attitude.
Or maybe do you want clarified decision process? For now, people that feel interested by a PR raise their voice. I don't know if we need something more formal For important design decisions there is vm-dev mailing list to discuss about that.
cheers Nicolas
cheers, Esteban
I once thought that the Pharo fork could be the place for the pharo team to manage official stable versions. But I agree that this is too much duplicated work and would be very happy to see the work happen upstream too.
If you have constructive ideas that will help decoupling all these problems, we are all ear.
PS: i did not post this answer for avoiding sterile discussion, but since Phil asked...
You are right, branch development is not compatible with versionning of generated code because it leads to unsolvable merge conflicts. So you legitimately raise the question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/893913/should-i-store-generated-code-in-... Whatever diverging opinions, the very first condition for automating code generation is to have reproducible artifacts (generated code).
I don't like the idea of sticking generated code into an SCCS either - it just seems wrong and likely to mislead people that just don't get the idea of dynamically generated code - BUT against that is the reproducibility thing which a colossal issue for practical sanity.
Maybe I should offer a snippet that sticks a big warning as a comment in front of every single generated routine "This code was generated from XXXX on DDDDDD:HHMMSS and should not be edited let alone edited and pushed back into SCCS"
Or alternatively, maybe changing the VMMaker to output its work in BrainFuck or Whitespace or some other machine-but-not-human readable form.... :-)
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
On Sunday 01 April 2018 06:49 AM, tim Rowledge wrote:
Maybe I should offer a snippet that sticks a big warning as a comment in front of every single generated routine "This code was generated from XXXX on DDDDDD:HHMMSS and should not be edited let alone edited and pushed back into SCCS"
I think there are two problems mixed up here. One is about sticking meta data tags like version control tags into generated source code. This is an easier problem to solve with Git.
The second, and more difficult one, is that an artifact is dependent on two types of sources only one of which can be compiled directly by automated builds. The other type (auto generated from .st) requires manual intervention during compiling and intermediate code needs to be preserved for debugging.
What if Slang could append a version hash at the end of the generated file and use a special extension (say *.cpk) to mark such augmented files?
HASH=xxxxxxxx
Build scripts can use this hash file to decide if the corresponding .c file needs to be compiled or not:
foo.hash : foo.cpk update foo.hash iff its HASH differs from that in foo.cpk
foo.o : foo.hash unpack foo.c from foo.cpk compile foo.c to get foo.o
A CPK could also concat a compressed C file with a HASH line and the C part could be extracted by the build script. It will deter people from editing a pack file while still allowing access to intermediate code for VM developers.
If a single ST coded component generates multiple *.[ch] files, they could all be packed into a single file and share the same hash. Build scripts can unpack and recompile individual files if the hash changes.
Regards .. Subbu
On 31 Mar 2018, at 23:31, Nicolas Cellier nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com wrote:
2018-03-31 20:36 GMT+02:00 Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com mailto:estebanlm@gmail.com>:
hi,
On 31 Mar 2018, at 17:34, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com mailto:nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com> wrote:
2018-03-31 15:03 GMT+02:00 Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com mailto:estebanlm@gmail.com>:
On 30 Mar 2018, at 23:56, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com mailto:nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com> wrote:
2018-03-24 11:11 GMT+01:00 Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com mailto:estebanlm@gmail.com>:
hi,
On 24 Mar 2018, at 09:50, Cyril Ferlicot D. <cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com mailto:cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com> wrote:
Le 23/03/2018 à 21:52, Eliot Miranda a écrit :
Hi Damien,
Indeed the image is corrupt at start-up. See below.
Right. This VM is prior to the bug fixes in VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320:
Spur: Fix a bad bug in SpurPlnningCompactor. unmarkObjectsFromFirstFreeObject, used when the compactor requires more than one pass due to insufficient savedFirstFieldsSpace, expects the corpse of a moved object to be unmarked, but copyAndUnmarkObject:to:bytes:firstField: only unmarked the target. Unmarking the corpse before the copy unmarks both. This fixes a crash with ReleaseBuilder class>>saveAsNewRelease when non-use of cacheDuring: creates lots of files, enough to push the system into the multi-pass regime.
Pharo urgently needs to upgrade the VM to one more up to date than 2017 08 27 (in fact more up-to-date than opensmalltalk/vm commit 0fe1e1ea108e53501a0e728736048062c83a66ce, Fri Jan 19 13:17:57 2018 -0800). The bug that VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320 fixes can result in image corruption in large images, and can occur (as it has here) at start-up, causing one's work to be irretrievably lost.
Hi Eliot,
I think that there is a lot of people who would like to get a newer stable vm for Pharo 6.1 and 7. The problem is that it is hard to know which VM are stable enough to be promoted as stable.
Some weeks ago Esteban tried to promote a VM as stable and he had to revert it the same day because a regression occurred in the VM.
If you're able to tell us which vms are stable in those present at http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ and http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ it would be a great help.
Even better would be for the pharo community to have a way to know which vms are stable or not without having to ask you.
there is no “stable” branch in Cog, and that’s a problem. “released” versions (the version you can find as stable) are not working for Pharo :(
I tried to promote versions from end feb and that crashed.
next week I will try again, maybe now they are stable enough… one thing is true: the versions that we consider stable (from oct/17) present problems that are already solved on latest.
Esteban
Have a nice day.
-- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot
-- Cyril Ferlicot https://ferlicot.fr https://ferlicot.fr/
Hi, Several problems are mixed here, let's try and decouple:
- there are ongoing development in the core of VM that may introduce some instability
- there are ongoing development in some plugins also
- there are infrastructure problems preventing to produce artifacts whatever the intrinsic stability of the VM
you are right in all points, but for me this is a problem of process.
- we have no defined milestones so nobody knows if they can jump to help.
- plugin development happens “by his own” and nobody knows what happens, why happens and how it happens.
- infrastructure is not bad and a lot of efforts has been made to make it work. But code sources are scattered around the world and the only thing that reunites them is the hand of the one who generates the C sources.
IMHO, is this “disconnection” what causes most of the problems.
cheers, Esteban
Hi Esteban, I see no fatality, and github also provides tools for that. Look, there is the project page on github https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/projects/1 https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/projects/1
Maybe the Pharo team is willing to collaborate and take active parts in definition of milestones?
For 1) development happens in VMMaker, and we have to be relying on experts. Today that is Eliot and Clement. We all want 64bits VM, improved GC, improved become:, write barrier, ephemerons, threaded FFI calls and adaptive optimization. Pharo is relying on these progress, they are vital. IMO, we are reaching a good level of confidence, and I hope to see some VMMaker version blessed as stable pretty soon.
Instead of whining, the best we can do for reaching this state is help them by providing accurate bug reports and even better reproducible cases. Thanks to all who are working in this direction.
For 2) we had a few problems, but again this is for improving important features (SSL...) Much of the development happens in feature branches already. But since we are targetting so many platforms, and don't have automated tests that scale yet, we still need beta testers. We can discuss about the introduction of such beta features wrt release cycles, that will be a good thing. Ideally we should tend toward continuous integration and have very short cycles, but we're not yet there.
For 3) we had a lot of problems, like staled links, invalid credentials, evolution of the version of tools at automated build site, etc...
If we don't build the artifacts, then we can't even have a chance to test the stability of 1) and 2) We have to understand that 3) is absolutely vital.
May I remind that for a very long period last year, the build were broken due to lack of work at Pharo side. Fortunately, this has changed in 2018. Fabio has been working REALLY hard to improve 3), and without the help of Esteban,I don't think he could have reached the holy green build status. We will never thank them enough for that. This also shows that cooperation may pay.
But this is still very fragile. If we want to make progress, we should ask why it is so. We could analyze the regressions, and decide if the complexity is sustainable, or eventually drop some drag. We are chasing many hares by building the VM for Newspeak/Pharo/Squeak i386/x86_64/ARM Spur/Stack/V3 Sista/lowcode linux/Macosx/Windows ... If it happens that a fix vital for Pharo/Squeak does break Newspeak tests, then it slows down the progress... Maybe we would want to decouple a bit more the problems there too (they may come from some image side weakness).
Last two years I've also observed some work exclusively done in the Pharo fork of the opensmalltalk VM. This was counter productive. Work must be produced upstream, or it's wasted.
This happened just once or twice. And it was because people were ignorant of “joint" so they continued contributing as before (and people were pointed to right place when we had the opportunity). And I disagree this was counterproductive because I took the effort to merge the changes into osvm. This worked fine until I stopped to do that job, but well… just one PR got stalled there for months and Alistair integrated it recently.
What *did happen* and I’m still not ready to let it go is a lot of the small changes that we presented to be rejected (or ignored) without further consideration. But well, let’s keep it positive and not enter to sterile discussions, I just think you are wrong with this argument.
No, it's important, we (opensmalltalk-vm team) can't let such bad feeling and frustration creep in. Every contribution counts, that does not mean that every PR will be accepted, but we owe an explanation if not. Some are accepted instantly, some are accepted after modification requests, some are rejected (I hope with some rationalization). What is problematic is that some were ignored for too long time, I regret the situation, but there is no deliberate intention to ignore them, just lack of manpower IMO. For example, the recent work of Alistair shows that there is no fatality here, it's just that someone has to do the hard work (kudos!).
I’m sorry for have a bitter feeling, but I’m going to give you an example so you understand why I’m saying this: I proposed the refactor of Alien package (which is obviously right and simple) at least three times in last three years (by different means). First time I’ve been told “no, we prefer it like that”. Second time I’ve been told “we need to think about that” (and no answer later). Last time I even didn’t receive a response. So well, when Torsten proposed it he first came to me. I told him “talk in vm-dev and good luck”. His proposal was accepted (thanks god). Several situations like this one made me think that I’m a second class citizen in this community. And you know what? I’m 46 years and I do not want to be treated as is I’m a child that can play with the toys someone let me or not. So yes, I’m sad and not very “into” this this days. I made a lot of efforts to came back for the de facto fork we had because I always pushed to work together. But I do not see the spirit of collaboration I hoped.
Torsten has brought the technical merits of doing so, and the cons of status quo, it was nothing personnal. I don't know how the topic was brought on vm-dev. at that time. Probably the technical merit was not perceived then. For me, you are in the opensmalltalk team, this does not mean 2nd zone (or the whole Smalltalk community is second zone then).
Also, the question is coupled with stability: having a red status does not help, for almost every PR that I accepted, I had to dig into travis console reports and compare to status of previous build in order to know if it was a regression, or just a long time failing case... This does not scale!
is worst that "does not scale". again, let me put you an example: Imagine I want to work on FFI and I need to touch both an external file and VMMaker: I cannot do a PR because VMMaker is not there and VM building will be broken and I cannot push VMMaker because platform sources are not there and VM building will be broken too. So, the only solution is what happens today: I need to push VMMaker and changes at the same time. So I’m forced to work on the development branch (we are all forced to work there), instead how I think it should be: each one should be able to work on their branch and contribute changes through PRs (PRs that can be validated with a good CI process).
As a consequence, since all contributions go to the development branch… we have no stability and we need to wait of the blessing of a VM. That may or may not happen.
Meh, whatever… is obvious that my way of work is different to most of the people of this community so I will go back to what I do now: just the absolutely necessary.
It's not at all about my way or your way, you don't have to make it something personal. It' about the feasibility and sustainability of the different solutions. You are right, branch development is not compatible with versionning of generated code because it leads to unsolvable merge conflicts. So you legitimately raise the question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/893913/should-i-store-generated-code-in-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/893913/should-i-store-generated-code-in-source-control Whatever diverging opinions, the very first condition for automating code generation is to have reproducible artifacts (generated code). You know that it's not the case today, even if generating twice from the very same image. We can't shove this problem under the carpet. Otherwise, two different build of the same source could lead to different VM behavior, which would be worse than what we have today.
Beside, except Eliot, Clement and Ronaldo, most developers work on plugins. Developping plugins in branches is still possible, unlike core VM. There is a reduced probability of conflict of gnerated code given the number of concurrent developpers today. So we commit in trunk more often than strictly necessary IMO.
hi,
(concentrating on the positive)
yes and no :) first, I find this discouraging for people that may jump in to help. second, most plugins are developed as part of VMMaker package, so the problem remains (guess who proposed to split VMMaker into SLANG, VMMaker, and Plugins* a lot of time ago? :P )
in my ideal illusory world, plugins would be decoupled from VMMaker, each one on their separated package. That would make what you propose possible.
cheers! Esteban
Finally, the case you are describing is rare and mostly concern modification of core VM. As said in other thread, dev cycle of core VM feature is long anyway (6+ month). In this context, feature branch are not sustainable. A good branch is a short branch, everything else is illusory and leads to merge nightmares. In such conditions, one have to accept temporary unstability and organize release cycles with stabilisation phase. How differently does the Pharo release cycle works? You have raised good points concerning the organization of those cycles. My answer does not change: take your place, throw inferiority complex away and participate. You are very capable, and it will be beneficial to the community at large.
And don't take this answer as advocacy for the status quo. I'm trying to analyze and identify locks. It does not mean that we can't unlock :)
cheers Nicolas
cheers, Esteban
ps: I will not continue discussing this… I know how things are and I’m sorry to put such a negative perspective in this list, but I needed to say it.
I'm all for more distributed power, and that should come with responsibilities, first a cooperative "you break it, you fix it" attitude.
Or maybe do you want clarified decision process? For now, people that feel interested by a PR raise their voice. I don't know if we need something more formal For important design decisions there is vm-dev mailing list to discuss about that.
cheers Nicolas
cheers, Esteban
I once thought that the Pharo fork could be the place for the pharo team to manage official stable versions. But I agree that this is too much duplicated work and would be very happy to see the work happen upstream too.
If you have constructive ideas that will help decoupling all these problems, we are all ear.
PS: i did not post this answer for avoiding sterile discussion, but since Phil asked...
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