[Glass] Locked by Smalltalkhub and Tonel

[Dale Henrichs]

On 10/6/20 1:04 PM, Bruno Buzzi Brassesco via Glass wrote:
> I have 3 dependencies on Smalltalkhub that are not working.

Do you mean that you are not able to download from Smalltalkhub or that 
you need to make changes and cannot write to Smalltalkhub ...

If it's the former, you should send a message to the Pharo list and get 
the problem addressed... There were some stability issues in the last 
month or so, but AFAICT those have been addressed.

If it's the latter, then we do need to do something.

> All were moved to github but stored in Tonel format:
> https://github.com/pharo-contributions/XML-XMLParser
> https://github.com/pharo-contributions/XML-XPath
> https://github.com/pharo-contributions/XML-XMLWriter
>
> Which is the best way to install them on GS ?
> 1) Wait until GS includes Tonel format ?
> 2) Fork and install them in Pharo then locally save them as FileTree 
> (then git push).
> 3) Try with *http://deprecated.smalltalkhub.com/ 
> <http://deprecated.smalltalkhub.com/>* (available until november)

I think this is a valid option for loading existing packages for the 
foreseeable future (READONLY)... My understanding is that the STATIC 
smalltalkhub site will be maintained for a long time ... I think that 
November was the original date that was scheduled for the cutover to a 
purely static site. The problems that I mentioned earlier caused the 
Pharo folks to switch to the static site ahead of schedule ...

But since this is a read only option we need to create a GemStone fork 
of the XML projects.

With Rowan I can read tonel and write filetree, so creating and 
populating the fork is not an issue ...

I am slightly concerned that pharo-contributions projects have been 
evolving over the last few years without keeping the GemStone port 
up-to-date (there are still GemStone packages in the projects, however, 
the GemStone specs have been stripped from the baselines), but with a 
little bit of TLC, we should be able to be in business ...

As usual, I am pretty busy, but now I'm busy with the upcoming 3.6.0 
release and I'm on the critical path (at least for the next several 
weeks), so I don't have the time to provide the necessary TLC to get the 
projects ported back to GemStone. I do have the time to create forks of 
the pharo-contributions/XML-* projects, convert tonel to filetree, and 
set things up to run tests on travis, but beyond that would be pushing 
things too far for me.

Rowan won't be available in 3.6.0, but it is scheduled to show up in 
3.7. There are some features in 3.6.0 that are critical to some of our 
customers and we had to push the release of Rowan into 3.7.

I mention this because my thoughts are that I would do a direct fork of 
the pharo-contributions/XML-* projects and convert to filetree in a 
separate directory structure ... that way over time, there would be a 
path between the filetree and tonel formats. I would create a topaz solo 
script that would convert back and forth between filetree and tonel 
format, so that we can actively keep up-to-date with the 
pharo-contributions/XML-* projects as well as feed back bugfixes.

Sooo if there are other folks that have the time and interest to work on 
porting the pharo-contributions/XML-* projects to GemStone, I will go 
ahead and get the ball rolling.

I took a cursory look at state of the XML projects a couple of weeks ago 
and it looks like there have been significant changes made since the 
pharo-contributions projects were forked from smalltalkhub, so I am very 
curious about the fact that if we base the work on pharo-contributions 
we'll be leaving some XML users in the dust.

Dale

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