Squeak Janitor

Matthew Fulmer kindly posted a progress report on the relicensing work and the release of Squeak 4.0.  The goal with 4.0 is to have a version with no content not licensed either under the MIT License or the Apache License.  This has been a long process but it is finally nearing completion.  However we are left with remnants still not relicensed and now the only choice seems to be either to remove or replace them.  This is the work now going on.  If you are interested in helping out with this read Matthew's progress report and follow the links reading very carefully.  We are still working out the procedures and interfacing with us on the #squeak IRC channel would be an extremely good idea.

*edit - fixed link*

For some weeks now Keith Hodges, Matthew Fulmer, and I have been discussing how to adjust our Mantis installation to facilitate the plans for 3.11 and related releases.  3.11 includes automation in the development process and the desire was to be able to leverage Mantis to control the automation.  It took me a while to understand the plan and some back and forth was required to come up with the final changes.  In the end we took a minimal approach and added two new issue statuses and slightly redefined an exisiting one.

New:

PENDING - This status indicates that a fix is attached to the issue and that an Installer script is added in a note to allow easy installation of the fix.

TESTING - This status indicates that a fix is attached to the issue,  that an Installer script is added in a note to allow easy installation of the fix, and that this fix should be added to the current test candidate.  For this to work the Fixed in Version field also needs to be set to the appropriate release number.

Also RESOLVED is now meant to indicate that the fix is to be loaded into the release candidate.  Again this requires an Installer script and appropriate value in Fixed in Version.

I posted a 'No News is Good News' Box-Admins Team Report for last month.  Read it if you like.

It has been a while.  I could blame the holiday season partially, but ultimately I've just been distracted and somewhat lazy.  I've done the minimum of course but little more in the last couple of weeks.

Back in August of last year (2008) Klaus Witzel emailed me asking about all the open Mantis issues that appeared to have been addressed in 3.10.  On his prompting, at that point I took on the job of checking through all of the updates harvested for 3.10, 3.10.1, and 3.10.2 and closing the relevant Mantis reports where I was confident the proposed fix was indeed harvested and released.  Well nearly 5 months later I report that I'm pretty much done.  I closed the vast majority of the issues, I left a few open where further attention was needed, and there are a couple omore that may be closed after I get some feedback.

Hopefully this sort of thing will not be needed in the future.

Our first anniversary!  This is the 12th monthly issue of this report of announcements related to Squeak.

Squeak Carbon OS-X VM 3.8.19beta2U Ships

John McIntosh pushes out an update to the Squeak virtual machine implementation for the Apple Macintosh family.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132403.html

An Update on NXTalk

Michael Haupt sends out a short message with a link to an update on his NXTalk project working on a Smalltalk implementation for the Mindstorms NXT robotics platform.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132406.html
http://haupz.blogspot.com/2008/11/its-alive.html

Squeak Win32 VM 3.10.9

Andreas Raab links to a new release of the Squeak Virtual machine for the Microsoft Windows platform.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132432.html

Squeak Win32 VM 3.10.10

Andreas quickly follows up with a new release of the Squeak virtual machine for the Microsoft Windows platform addressing a couple of issues.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132444.html

Lightweight Classes

Hernán Morales Durand announces the availability of "an implementation of Lightweight Classes for Squeak that follows the original paper "Debugging Objects" of Hinkle et al."

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132465.html

Sparkle Automatic Update Framework for Squeak OS-X

John McIntosh announces the availability of "a plugin to enable the use of Sparkle to receive update information about the macintosh carbon VM.  This lets you auto-update your Squeak based application by pushing
update notifications via rss to users."

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132505.html

Leadership Team Meeting Notes for 2008-11-19

Craig Latta reports on the mid-November meeting of the Squeak Leadership Team.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132513.html

Second Call for Feedback on Naiad Design

After receiving little response to his earlier email linking to the Naiad design notes Craig Latta decides to email the notes directly to the list.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132514.html

Lightweight Class Browser

Hernán Morales Durand follows up his earlier announcement with one about a new code browser based on Omnibrowser.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132690.html

Alien FFI

John McIntosh reports on the porting of his Alien FFI project to Pharo.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132715.html

Alien FFI Documentation

John McIntosh follows up with a link to documentation for Alien FFI.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132735.html

Mac Carbon VM Squeak 3.8.20beta1U.app Ships for Testing

John McIntosh announces the availability of a new testing release of the Squeak virtual machine implementation for the Apple Macintosh platform.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132817.html

Logging Improvements

Keith Hodges announces a new release of his Logging framework.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132853.html

Graduate Position (Smalltalk Involved), Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Mathieu van Echtelt announces the availability of a research position that includes work using Smalltalk.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132891.html

Logging Updated

Keith Hodges follows up announcing further updates to his Logging framework.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-December/132923.html

Sake-Packages New Feature

Keith Hodges reports on a new feature found in the latest releases of his package management framework.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-December/132924.html

Leadership Team Meeting Notes for 2008-12-03

Craig Latta reports on the early-December meeting of the Squeak Leadership Team.

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-December/132953.html

This periodic publication is meant to capture those Squeak related announcements which appeared on public mailing lists but were not sent to the Squeak Announcements mailing list. Ideally there would be no need for this publication but use of the Announcements mailing list has not quite settled in the community's unconscious. So if you have an
announcement and do not wish to suffer the fate of my terse summaries I suggest you Cc announcements@lists.squeakfoundation.org.

Well I finally got out the Box-Admins Team report for November which was really due on Wednesday.  Not much to report but I firmly believe on regular reports even if there is nothing to say other than a continuation of the status quo.

Also I pushed a new release of my Squeak Roundup collecting announcements to the Squeak-dev mailing list that did not make it to the Announcements mailing list.  I will also publish it here on this blog shortly.

Well, after the promise of Monday this week has not been particularly productive Squeak-wise.  I did nothing really in the last couple of days.  I did manage to come up with a little time today but only closed one issue.  But I learned a few things with this one.

The issue I closed is #5285.  I had looked at this one previously and gotten really confused.  I went back to it today with fresh eyes and started doing a manual version history bisection with the handy Dual Change Log tool for Monticello from Keith Hodges.  The EToys history was really looking strange.  I won't go into the details but suffice it to say that my conception of the version history as it appears in the tool was mistaken.  Also I was reminded that I have a very poor memory and mentioned that versions had been left out of 3.10 in the past.

Also I had been ignoring the fact the entries in the list can be in plain type, bold type, or underlined.  Bert Freudenberg kindly clued me in.  It turns out that bold entries are versions not in the ancestry of the current working copy (the version in the image).  And underlined versions are the current version, or more accurately (thanks to Matthew Fulmer) the immediate ancestor of the working copy.  Anyway this information all clued me into the fact that I was comparing the wrong versions.  Once I got that sorted out it was clear and I confirmed the code was harvested.

I also need to get out my monthly Box-Admins Team report and a new Roundup...

[edited: typo corrected]

The Squeak 3.10 release team was one of the first to start basing their work on reports entered into the Squeak Bug Server.  However for some reason they failed to close most of the reports that they addressed.  This was pointed out to me some months ago and off and on I have been going through all of the updates harvested for 3.10, checking the associated reports, comparing the reports to the code that was harvested, verifying that they match, and closing the reports with appropriate notices.  This is a slow and often tedious task.  Recently I've been trying to spend one hour per day on this task.

Today's hour had some distractions but most of the reports today were fairly straightforward and I managed to close seven of them.  I'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, it's possible I could finish this task this week or maybe next.

I'm an odd jobs man.  I'm the Squeak Box-Admins team leader and have been since early 2005.  The Box-Admins team is responsible for maintaining the majority of Squeak websites and other Internet services.  In addition I lead the Janitors team which was a temporary team (Feb/2005 to Mar/2006) to move bug reports from the Squeak-dev mailing list to our newly setup Mantis server (bugs.squeak.org).  And I've done many small maintenance jobs related to Squeak infrastructure.

I will be using this blog to report on my work related to Squeak.  So please stay tuned.