Re: [Help-smalltalk] Blox and browser

[Holger Freyther]

> On 21 Jan 2016, at 18:54, address@hidden wrote:

Hi!

> I'm trying to use the current master branch (I've tried the 3.2.92 tag
> and the 3.2.5 tag as well).

3.2.92 and master are very close to each other. In fact the main reason
to wait for 3.3 is gst-browser (deadlocks and crashes)



> GNU Smalltalk version 3.2.92-504a8b8
> error: did not understand #blox
> MessageNotUnderstood(Exception)>>signal (ExcHandling.st:254)
> UndefinedObject(Object)>>doesNotUnderstand: #blox (SysExcept.st:1408)

I have never used the blox UI and in fact it has been deprecated in 2009.
Looking at the code the question is what is parentView and why is it nil
at this point.

View>>#parentView has the following comment:
"Return view's parentView.  If view is a rootView, nil is returned"

PList doesn't seem to have a parentView when >>#initialize is called. This
sounds like a fallout from my changes to >>#new changes I made in commit:
4a224a329b5e63ab6ed432f437eb822e995ae64d. You could try a version before
that commit?



> and sometimes (usually, in fact) it doesn't. However, when it does
> successfully boot up, the "new workspace" menu item and button do
> nothing, not even an error on stderr (this bug seems to be 5 years old,
> looking at the tracker and the mailing list). So the browser is
> basically useless for entering code.

That is with 3.2.92? That is odd. What are the compiler flags you are
using to build the VM? If you are familiar with GDB it would be nice if
you could print the smalltalk stack at the time it is crashing.



> At the moment installing the package onto my Ubuntu laptop produces much
> the same experience as I have described above with the exception that in
> that case gst-blox doesn't even exist as far as I can see and the
> browser never manages to start up.

gst-browser still requires the libgtk2-dev headers to be installed or
symlinks in the plugin directort.

I have used gst-browser mostly to browse and sometimes to debug. The known
issue for me is event-loop interaction and lock-ups (re-entering the event
loop while the event loop is dispatching gtk).

We are on irc.freenode.net and if you would be interested to have a look I
am happy to guide you.

kind regards
        holger