Dear all, I am tremendously happy to announce you that Pharo Consortium will sponsor yet another development effort. In this particular case, it's my honor to carry on such an effort and I will be developing and improving a few things and ideas. All the contract and paperwork has already been done so it's time to start working.
Regarding the developments itself, we discussed about these topics: 1) Experiment with a simpler yet more limited OSProcess alternative to execute OS commands. 2) Improving FileSystem in order to better deal with some POSIX stuff like symbolic links, unix file permissions, etc etc. I have already started with 1). OSProcess is super complete and it involves some packages (OSProcess / CommandShell) as well as some VM plugins (OSProcessPlugin, AIOPlugin). OSProcess provides lots of features (like forking the running image) but we would like to focus only in executing OS commands. In addition, OSProcess dates from quite some years ago when many of the current infrastructure features did not exist yet. So the idea is to think a simpler alternative to execute OS commands, using new features such as threaded FFI (for example, for reading async from pipes), pinned objects, etc. We want to use FFI as much as possible rather than VM plugins. >From the image side, we are thinking about an API which would look like a builder-like API (FileSystem, XStream, etc). We have been discussing with David Lewis (OSProcess author) as well as with Eliot Miranda, Esteban Lorenzano, Damien Pollet, Stephane Ducasse, etc in order to agree in a project that would be worth doing (otherwise we would continue using existing tools). And they have all been very kind with me providing positive discussions. I will soon do a survey to measure the most common use cases of OSProcess and related tools. If you have any thought, question, feedback, or whatever, please let us know. Finally, note that I will be doing this project together with another client's project (Quuve) and my life does not have much free time these days...so please be patient!!! Best, -- Mariano http://marianopeck.wordpress.com
