As some of you may know from my
blog, I have more than a passing interest scripting and build automation of VA Smalltalk. The recent release of 8.5 has broken the basic tool I created to load code into an out-of-the-box image, and I'm working with Instantiations on that, but it did raise the broader question of automation support in VA Smalltalk.
John O'Keefe has challenged us to come up with a set of requirements for this, so I'm going to do the OO thing and delegate the challenge on to the rest of the community. I'm willing to put together a summary document, but I need your input. I know there's been a lot of individual efforts to to retrofit automation into VA Smalltalk, so let's hear about what's good and bad about what's been done. I know that the Pharo community has been busy with Jenkins for automated builds - can somebody talk about what they've been doing?
For myself, I'll try to summarize my series of blog posts in a subsequent message, but basically what I'm looking for are these abilities:
- Load and save an image given a config map.
- Package an image, be it headful, headless or IC.
- Run a test suite and record the results.
- Run a Smalltalk script
At the very least, I want to be able to do these things from a script, without human intervention, on Windows or UNIX. Ideally, this would all be controllable from a continuous integration server such as Jenkins and allow me to report operational results there.
Let's hear your thoughts!
Tom Koschate [|]