I just had an experience that fuels my session manager fire. I loaded Pharo, and it was totally unresponsive. Why? I can't be absolutely certain, but here's my story: last night, I had an open connection to a system visible only with a vpn. With the vpn not in use, either Pharo (or more likely ODBC) went nuts because it could not find the server, and I finally killed the process, started the vpn, and all was well on the next startup. IMHO, hanging like that is one of the worst things software can do, and I think we can do a lot to fix it with a few simple changes.
Linux ODBC is probably partly to blame, but it should not have been invoked so early in statup. Someone recently argued against lazy connections, but this would not have happened if they were part of the design. The image would have become helpless once I did something that triggered database activity, but that is where overlapped calls enter the picture. Even without the, at least I would have been able to use the image. Note that if I had taken the offending image to another machine, it could have been useless - not good. Bill _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
