BodyBuilder: Packaging BOF at Smalltalk Solutions 2006

During the 2006 Smalltalk Solutions conference in Toronto a 'Packaging BOF' was held where people interested in automated build systems for Smalltalk discussed their experiences and projects. The BOF was well attended (twenty or so people), a poll at the beginning showed that attendants came exclusivly from the VisualWorks cummunity.

At first a couple of people described their current state of build automation but the discussion soon bogged down into the subject of creating a smaller base image and a finer-grained set of Packages for building up applications. It turns out that a lot of shops ship their apps as parcels that are loaded onto a base image at application startup. Several people complained that loading Parcels was slow and that proposed fixes to speed it up have not been picked up by Cincom. One of the problems is that #rebindEntireSystem is called more often than needed. Eliot said that if the code did what people reported it was doing then it is broken, according to him this rebinding shouldn't happen as often as people said it did.

Charles Monteiro suggested that a separate cummunity project be started that would maintain an alternate packaging tree of the Cincom code, I pushed back on that saying that such a project would need rather long-term credulence before commercially operating shops would pick up on it. Martin Kobetic suggested to go a step further and even include new code and patches, so that such code could be validated in the field before being adopted by the Cincom releases (he compared this to the relation between RedHat Linux and Mandrake Cooker).

Complaints were voiced that community donated fixes and additions too often don't end up in the Cincom releases. It became clear that Cincom suffers a bottleneck where they need to audit the code before aceping it into the base, the auditor is fully loaded by the changes created by Cincom staff and cannot handle additional changes coming from the community.

Not much time was devoted to discussing requirements for BodyBuilder, the main concern that was voiced was that it should operate in heterogenous build environments, i.e. it should be callable from Make and Ant.

Coming back to existing build environments Travis Griggs described Key's system by saying 'been there done that', he will release the code to the Open Repository and hopefully describe it here or on his blog.

In the end I walked away with te impression that my ideas about BodyBuilder would mostly cover what people desired.

The following questions became drowned out in the discussion, I ran them by Alan Knight afterwards:

specifying more exactly and declaratively what to load from Store / parcels: type (#any, #pundle, #package, #bundle, #parcel), Store repository, version (=, descendant of)
specifying prerequisites with above details
adding VW version compatibility properties to pundles

Specifying what to load (Package vs Parcel) is in the realm of BodyBuilder not in that of Store and should not leak through into Store. We discussed adding a 'version algebra' to Store and prereqs without coming to a real conclusion, Alan did point out that there is an ongoing 'Configuration Management' project at Cincom that wants to address these concerns but nothing has seen the light of day yet. Unfortunately I failed to cover the last bullet above :-(

Thanks to Charles A. Monteiro for getting this BOF organized.

--RH