"Paolo Bonzini"<bonzini@gnu.org> wrote: > For the VCS, I've always been surprised there's no git or svn backend > for Monticello. It wouldn't seem _too_ hard to have a directory per > package and replace each .mcz file with a commit in that directory. > > Alternatively, there's actually very little GST-specific code in > http://github.com/timfel/gitocello (a Squeak+Monticello <-> GST+git > bridge), so if someone wants to play with it... I played with this back in 2000, when VW didn't have it's own VCS yet. Some might remember a project called CVST (http://cvstproj.sourceforge.net/). Ultimately I stopped working on it, because VW got Store, and Squeak got Monticello shortly after, and each of the dialect specific VCSs had some interesting features that CVS (back then) couldn't provide (not easily at least). The communities clearly valued the additional capabilities that their solutions provided. I tried to push CVST as a cross-dialect solution, but there seemed to be little interest in that. Another significant hurdle was that each dialect has it's own fileout format. CVST allowed using SIF as well for that reason, but that's foreign to every dialect. Would you be happy to commit your sources to git in SIF? Anyway, one aspect that I liked about CVST was that the image could be treated as a sort of "fancy editor" for the working copy of your code in the working directory, which might appeal to newcomers from other languages too. It's not tied to CVS in any way, you could use svn or git with it just as well (Here are slides that talk a bit more about how it worked http://www.slideshare.net/mkobetic/01-stscvst). It would require some update to plug into current packaging structures (e.g. packages in VW, it was integrated with parcels back then), but that wouldn't be difficult. Some level of dialect specific tool integration would be needed (I wrote some for VW, but those would mostly be replaced by rather simple RB extensions), overall I would expect it to be much work. What I wonder about though, if we did bring it up to date (or came up with something completely new), would people actually use it ? Because if most would still stick to their Store, Monticello X, Envy, etc, presumably because of some cool feature that they'd miss, the "yet another VCS" would be just a waste of time. But maybe times have changed and we, Smalltalkers, are more likely to accept something like svn or git even if we have to give up some of the niceties of our home-brew solutions.

On 10/29/2010 04:15 PM, mkobetic@cincom.com wrote: > Another significant hurdle was that each dialect has it's own fileout > format. CVST allowed using SIF as well for that reason, but that's > foreign to every dialect. Would you be happy to commit your sources > to git in SIF? I don't think inter-dialect communication is a problem. Any dialect should be able to use whatever it prefers, like XML for VW or chunks for Squeak or its own syntax for GST. Did CVST actually rely on SIF or did it just "allow" using it? Paolo