[Cuis-dev] Creating a stable distribution to support application development

[Hernan Wilkinson]

Hi David!
 I like your idea. The only problem I see is who is going to maintain that
version, I mean, who is going to check every update to see if that can be
applied to that version, test it, etc.
 One way to do it is, for people interested in having a version like that,
to clone the repo and maintain it as a kind of stable release. We would not
have one stable release "for the community" but at least one per person
that needs it.

 Anyway, this brings us back to the unsolved problem of applying changes in
a safe manner ... there was a thread about that a couple of weeks ago if
I'm not mistaken.

Cheers!
Hernan.



On Sat, Aug 7, 2021 at 4:31 PM Juan Vuletich via Cuis-dev <
cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> On 8/7/2021 8:25 AM, David Faitelson via Cuis-dev wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> First I would like to say a big big thank you for the amazing work you put
> into Cuis. I think it is one of the best development platforms I had the
> pleasure of working with (it's closest competitor being only the original
> Smalltalk-80 environment 🙂).
>
>
> Thanks! It is nice and encouraging to know this.
>
> To quote C.A.R Hoare, "Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that
> it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all
> its successors."
>
> In the last few years I have developed several non trivial applications on
> top of Cuis and Pharo: A parser generator and IDE, an educational
> environment for studying Turing machines, a compiler and IDE for a parallel
> programming language for Arduino boards, an educational math game, and
> others.
>
>
> Please consider publishing your projects too! They sound very interesting.
> You can host them in the Cuis-Smalltalk GitHub organization, on your
> separate GitHub repos, or on any other code repository server.
>
> So my interest in Cuis is more as a development platform. And I think that
> ultimately this is what we all want. That more and more people will use
> Cuis to develop their systems.
>
> However, at the moment (correct me if I'm wrong), there is no stable
> distribution that one can base their application development on. I can
> clone the latest repository and packages, and freeze a snapshot, but once
> development moves on I cannot simply update my system to the latest
> version, because bug fixes, new features, and incompatible changes are
> mixed in the same development stream.
>
>
> That is true. Whether it is a good or a bad thing is a matter of personal
> preference.
>
> For me, the best option is to keep own development in package files, and
> from time to time, to load them in a fresh updated Cuis image, and run
> tests. If something breaks, parallel debugging with the previous working
> system should quickly point to the problem. The method annotation will
> include the numbered change set that modified the code, and usually
> studying the change set in the previous working system will help finding
> out the modifications needed in own code.
>
> But you might prefer avoiding the update altogether, and that's ok too.
>
> What I think would be very helpful is to have a stable distribution of the
> core and associated packages that would only change to fix bugs without
> affecting the interfaces.
>
>
> Sounds like a reasonable option.
>
> But please don't call it "Stable". Up to 2016, we used to maintain
> https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk , calling it "Stable
> Releases". The problem was that most newcomers tried that instead of
> Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev, and therefore used a very outdated system. Eventually,
> I emptied the repo and marked it for deletion.
>
> As someone else in this thread said, I think "LTS" or "Long Term Support"
> is a much better name. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_support
> . It makes clear that you are trading new features and improvements for
> stability.
>
> I am more than willing to contribute my time to develop this concept, and
> I have a few ideas about how to do this, but I hope that I can find other
> people that think this is important and are interested in cooperating on
> this.
>
> What do you think? is this worthwhile? what would be a good way to proceed?
>
>
> I think it is a good idea, if there are people willing to maintain it. I
> won't be spending much time working on it, but I'm willing to, for example,
> handle version numbers or tags in main Cuis repo in a meaningful and
> coordinated way. I'm also willing to help maintainers understand any change
> that gives trouble.
>
> Cheers,
> David
>
> Dr. David Faitelson
>
> Senior Lecturer
>
> | Office: +972-3-7688782 | Mobile: +972-52-6568896
>
> Mivtza Kadesh St., Tel-Aviv 38
>
> www.afeka.ac.il
>
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Juan Vuletichwww.cuis-smalltalk.orghttps://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Devhttps://github.com/jvuletichhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-vuletich-75611b3
> @JuanVuletich
>
> --
> Cuis-dev mailing list
> Cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st
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>


-- 
<https://10pines.com/>Hernán WilkinsonSoftware Developer, Teacher & Coach

Alem 896, Floor 6, Buenos Aires, Argentina

+54 11 6091 3125

@HernanWilkinson
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