Re: [Help-smalltalk] Anyone willing to maintain the Squeak port of Iliad?

[Eli Green]

On Nov 20, 2009, at 12:11, Nicolas Petton wrote:
>> 
>> Can I ask you to hold off on this? I am working on something to automate the 
>> conversion of .star packages to Squeak syntax files and part of it would be 
>> a list of remapping rules to change namespaces to prefixes. I would hate for 
>> the GNU Smalltalk version of Iliad to get uglified for no good reason.
>> 
> 
> Sure! Can I help you on this?

Somebody could suggest the right way to do XML in Squeak. :)

My initial reaction was to whip something up in python using pyparsing which 
probably would have been much faster but I'm taking it as an opportunity to 
hone my sorely lacking Smalltalk skills.

This is the ultimate goal:

gst := GNUStarLoader singleton.
gst addDirectory: '/usr/share/whatever'.
gst mapNamespace: 'Iliad' toPrefix: 'IL'.
gst excludeClass: 'FileHandler' inNamespace: 'Iliad'. "according to Nicolas, 
this class is dialect-specific"
"mapping namespace Swazoo to prefix Swazoo is unnecessary since that will be 
the default behaviour"
gst loadPackage: 'Iliad'.

I'm investigating now whether it's possible to easily extend the Smalltalk 
parser in Pharo to return a list of tokens with some small amount of filtering 
done (simply replacing the namespaces with prefixes). Of course, there will 
need to be some way to exclude specific classes or categories so that 
GNU-specific code doesn't get loaded.

I'm hoping that once this is done, I can script loading the major releases of 
Iliad and generating .mcz files - but without including the version number in 
the package name as we currently do. This way people can more easily update 
from SqueakSource.

On question: are .star packages always zip files? Can you load a package from a 
directory?