Pharo mailing list weekly summary #4

Written on March 5 2011.

Here is the weekly summary of the Pharo project mailing list. If I missed something or say something wrong, please shout at me in the comments.

My hightlights of the week: at least three different project are in the tracks for a squeaksource replacement. Pharo 1.2 is almost out but everybody feels the need for a better infrastructure/process. If you want to get involved on this side and if you have enough time, do not hesitate to send your ideas and contributions.

Events

• Pharo Sprint in Lille. Saturday 12th March. Tell if you plan to go ;) full thread

• The sprint in Bern went very well. You can get an overview of what happened during the sprint on Twitter. To keep it short, Camillo worked on KeyMappings (see this thread for more info), Lukas playing WeakAnnouncements and OB. Adrian, Jorge and Toon started a debugger based on Glamour. They worked hard to decouple the model from the GUI. Mircea built a new widget for searching multiple categories of items in the same time. All in all, Glamour becomes more and more important in Pharo. full thread

• Stephan and Diego participated in Eindhoven startup weekend. They got the innovation price. I could not find more information on the event website :/ full thread.

Releases

• New release of Dr Geo II: 11.03. full thread

• Olivier released a LDAP package and a tutorial. It is known to work on Pharo 1.2rc. full threads here and there)

• Pharo 1.2 should be released. The infrastructure should be improved. At the moment time is lost in Metacello configurations for external packages. Stef reminds us this fact and want to see 1.2 final soon. One solution pushed by Doru would be to set a hard deadline one month before the release. Packages that do not work are removed from the distributon. Laurent pointed that the Linux process could also be a goot candidate. full thread

• Alexandre reminds us about the existence of SilverSmalltalk. full thread

Users

• More information about Squeaksource 3 on a thread. Nobody have heard about it before. As we have seen last week, the future looks promising. full thread

• There are some discussions about the state of OpenCroquet (now known as OpenCobalt). (full thread)

• Good thread on TDD. How many time should spend on tests?. Laurent gave a nice reference to Dave Astels book. If you dont know TDD or find it difficult to apply in practice, read the full thread

• Good question from Edouard. He pointed a stupid method: 2 days vs. 2 day. The latter evaluates to the duration of 1 day. full thread

• Dennis asked if it is possible to use russian fonts with the CogVM. full thread

• nullPointer experiences a very slow package loading on Windows. Mariano reminds that antivirus could be the root of the problem. full thread

• Alexandre asked what Coral is about. Documentation is lacking but according the authors it should work. The only tutorial you will find about it is written in french and does not go very deep. full thread

• Stef explained to Miguel how to get a diff between to versions on Monticello. It is the kind of thing you will obviously need one day. Bookmark this post ;) full thread

• Laurent discovered that SSL is not supported on Pharo out of the box. Sven mentioned SqueakSSL but it does not seem to work on Pharo (MacOS and Linux seem problematic as well). Esteban proposed to use stunnel to create an SSL tunneling proxy. Not very elegant and straightforward but it works. full thread

• Olivier asked if there are any documents on how to create GUIs in Pharo. Pharocasts were mentioned and Bill explained briefly the born of Morphic and Polymorph. full thread

• Stef struggled to load Magritte without Seaside. He gave the snippet:

  Gofer it
    renggli: 'magritte2';
    package: 'ConfigurationOfMagritte2';
    load.
  
  (ConfigurationOfMagritte2 project version: '2.0.6') load: #('Core')
  

Internal and discussions

• Dale did a solo sprint to fix the failing tests in Metacello and released a new version. full threads here and there.

• Stef introduced RPackage, a rewrite of PackageInfo. full thread. More discussion about it in this other thread.

• Stef continues his war against uncommented classes. It is sometimes very difficult to use a class/package/framework when you do not know where to start. full thread

• Discussion about the Azul Pauseless garbage collector. If you are into the VM things, you could be interested with how it compare with the VisualWorks garbge collector. full thread

• Marcus have some news from the Hudson front. They now have a Mac (so mac VMs will probably soon get the benefits of the continuous integration server). The Cog Unix VMs are also continuously built. And there is a new build for Project Sista. full thread

• Eliot wrote a blog post about JIT. full thread

• Stef warned the community about XXX. He seems to approach people with (crazy) business plans. He sent proposals to VCs where he mentioned virtual key team members who are in fact not related with him. German did not have bad experience with XXX. Anyway, be careful if you’re approached by a suspicious VC.

• Pavel opened a ticket to get pangrams for various language. full thread

• Hilaire wants to get Locale works with a CogVM (to use it with the underpowered XO laptop). If you want to play with GDB and to dig into the VM the thread should interest you. full thread

• SqueakDBX will get slots for SummerTalk. Three mentors, three students. Very good news for this project. full thread

• The state of Smalltalk on tablets and mobile in this thread.

• Benjamin announced that he (with Igor) managed to get a new Smalltalk kernel based on Pharo which is 2.2Mb and includes 230 classes. Impressive. This is very important to reach one the Pharo’s goal: have a minimal kernel from which needed packages are loaded. full thread

As usual, a lots of bugs were fixed and technical details were discussed both in the mailing list and in the bug tracking system.