Unstable changes in main

[Brian Rice]

Okay, the problems have been worked out, and bugs fixed. New images,  
VM sources, and patches are now available in main and alpha, with an  
updated tarball. The 'SlateDir' feature is not yet available but will  
be shortly.

On Aug 30, 2005, at 8:31 AM, Brian Rice wrote:

> I have a set of changes I'd been debugging locally for a week, and  
> progress has slowed, so I've pushed them into the main repository  
> for increased exposure. There is a tag on the main repository  
> StablePoint-0.3.5.1 which is before all of these patches, so stop  
> there if you don't want to deal with this. I'll reply when the  
> issues are resolved.
>
> The changes are:
> 1) A big change and cleanup in how directories are handled,  
> including trying to make LogicalDirectory a general facility,  
> basically where they hold onto a block used to update their  
> locators when needed (for Directory Home, this is on starting the  
> image; for Directory Current, this is just on chdir calls). This  
> may turn out to be a poor design decision, but I needed to make  
> progress. The intent is that a SlateDir can be made and recorded  
> during the post-bootstrap phase, which the image then remembers  
> when it looks for standard sources (even if we have to change  
> "load: 'src/...'" into "load: 'src/...' &from: SlateDir" or "load:  
> SlateDir / 'src/...'). This would allow Slate to run from anywhere  
> in the file system without complaint.
>
> 2) Fixes to Directory Proxy to make it Dictionary-based instead of  
> slot-based, since the latter mixes up the object-oriented knowledge  
> with other information, and was causing some real headaches. It  
> also mostly works now. ;)
>
> 3) A refactored UI for Restart objects, mostly so that only the  
> Debugger needs to know which console it's using, and so that the  
> debugger mediates the UI requests of the Restart objects. This  
> seems to be the patch that is causing most of the bootstrap issues,  
> since it's become hard to debug new images if the restart ui is  
> slightly off.
>
> The fixes are probably easy, but I haven't perceived them yet. I'll  
> tag the repository again when it's resolved.

--
-Brian