Johan,
Thanks for the excellent feedback ... You have touched on some issues
that I am aware of and appreciate your suggestions ... you have also
touched on some issues that I hadn't thought about ...
I want to let your feedback marinate a bit ... you have provided enough
detail that I think I understand where the improvements are needed, but
I'm not sure I know the right way to address them ... yet.
Please continue to let us know about your learning adventure:)
Dale
On 04/22/2011 02:36 PM, Johan Fabry wrote:
Hi all,
I'd like to give a bit of feeback on the metacello browser. First
some context: I am aware of the core concepts of configuration
management, but because of lack of time I never got to learn
Metacello. So I thought this browser would be ideal for me, I gave it
a go, and I'd like to report on my experience.
The first try did not work at all for me, because I started with a
configuration that is too complex. So lets start with the second try,
something simpler, and first get that sorted out before we do the
complex one. Here we go: I have a SqueakSource project
TraitsApplication with one package TraitsApplication which contains
TraitsApplication and TraitsApplication-Tests categories (and the
former contains a TraitsApplication class :-P ). Following the
prompts in the browser I was able to make a configuration and save it
to SqueakSource, without any real problems. So the cool thing is, I
made my first Metacello config today and it even works :-)
One issue is how to load my creation. I am used to a big do-it that
gets the config via Gofer and contains '(Smalltalk at:
#ConfigurationOfFoo) perform: #loadDefault'. Many configs do it like
this, as a user I considered it a standard convention. But this turns
out not to work, because no loadDefault has been defined. Perchance I
remembered how I had to load MetacelloBrowser
'(ConfigurationOfMetacelloBrowser project version: #stable) load' and
adapting it to TraitsApplication (not forgetting
version:#development) made it to work. So, the question: why is there
no #loadDefault generated, nor an obvious way to specify what the
default should be? (At least for simple cases of the configuration,
like this one)
The second issue is the UI. It is confusing at times, there are
multiple issues and I list them in random order - Why can I not click
on '+Configuration' when there is no configuration selected in the
left hand side? - What do the unit-test icons at the left of the
configs and baselines-versions-... mean? I turn them green by
double-clicking on them, which also gets me an inspector on an empty
collection. Huh? - The context menu is too big and confusing. It
should be subdivided and ordered by group. Submenus are in order I
think. - What are groups? The help menu does not enlighten me.
Next up: making a config for AspectMaps (the first thing I tried and
that did not work). But this is for another day ... -- Johan Fabry
[email protected] - http://dcc.uchile.cl/~jfabry PLEIAD Lab -
Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile
