[Glass] Metacello ... is there something easy with it ?

[James Foster]

On Jun 6, 2014, at 8:56 AM, itlists at schrievkrom.de wrote:

> Am 06.06.2014 16:00, schrieb Dale Henrichs:
>> There is a tutorial that you can run in a Pharo image (your GemTools
>> image should work).  It should give you enough information to be dangerous:)
>> 
> 
> Downloaded it, tried it - but -- well it does not work.
> 
> Hmm, I actually I did not expect it to work out of the box - that's the
> reality of the squeak world (Hello Joachim :-))).
> 
> That's all a very unstable (and serious bad) situation.
> 
> We have GemTools, we have Jade - that the state of today. We have 3.2.0
> and we should have a software base working on these platforms (actually
> we have that - the original delivered extend). When leaving this base it
> becomes an adventure.
> 
> In one of the tuturials it is said: do a copy of the MetacelloTemplate
> class - even this simple sentence becomes a problem, if the tools do not
> support creating a copy of a class and if there is not a class with the
> same name as mentioned in the tutorial.
> 
> That means for me: I stay away from all public repositories and
> keep/maintain my own packages (Zinc and Neo-JSON). I just use Monticello
> packages from my own http sources and write my own loading stuff -
> that's of course a disaster in terms of software reuse.
> 
> 
> A pretty angry,
> 
> 
> Marten Feldtmann

As you note, GemStone/S does work quite well in its “native” environment—scripting command-line tools (shell and Topaz) and source code in text files (cvs, svn, git, …). The problems come when we want free Envy-like tools to work in multiple dialects (including free ones). The questions then become:
	(1) What should be done?
	(2) Who should do it?
	(3) Who should pay for it?
Until someone comes up with a good answer to #3, I don’t see much change from the current (slow?) progress of improvement. 

James