On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 3:11 AM, Luke Gorrie <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Ben, > > Thanks for explaining the process for maintaining the stable vs development > versions and illustrating it with data. > > I need to understand the Pharo Launcher better. Could indeed be the best > strategy is to focus on supporting that well. That's basically the approach > that Damien has taken with the current nix packages. > > Hopefully we can work out the optimal way to package Pharo once 6.0 has > shipped and people have more bandwidth. Just now I have a hard time > understanding what VM+image combinations are considered to be "supported"
In times past, the VM from the previous release has usually remained stable for the most of the next development cycle. Except last year there was a big change from pre-Spur to Spur, and this year a big change from 32-bit to 64-bit, as you can see from the rate of change... https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/graphs/contributors These two very positive events obviously came with more churn in updating the VM. > vs which ones are likely to have obscure plugin problems, etc. I've not seen many plugin problems reported. Now unless you join the consortium or otherwise pay for support, I would guess you'll get the "best" support on the tip of development, with the risk of being the first to categorise a new bug. What might be good is to periodically define some recommended in-development VM-Image combinations, so we get more people working with a particular combination - to more quickly hit bugs in a particular combo, and provide confidence for the more cautious to move their applications forward. That is, not the effort of a full release, (@Esteban?) Very broadly, I'd stick with the Pharo 6 release for the first 3 - 6 months while any high impact stuff that has been waiting in the wings during the Pharo 6 feature freeze are integrated. Then as Pharo-6 bugs fixed in Pharo-7-dev accumulate, consider moving your personal development to Pharo-7-dev, keeping release on Pharo-6. It probably a good idea port your app to Pharo-7-dev at least three months prior to its release - so any bugs you hit get fixed *in* Pharo 7, otherwise (unless they are critical, or you pay) you may end up waiting until Pharo 8 release. Probably its good to have CI running for both Pharo 6 Release and Pharo-7-dev-tip so your tests pick up any new bugs. https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/ @Damien might advise how compatible this is with nix. (Disclaimer: Pharo is currently just a (significant) hobby for me, so in practice YMMV.) cheers -ben
