[kepler-dev] Why I can't work: a plea for stability

Christopher Brooks cxh at eecs.berkeley.edu
Thu Apr 20 12:48:31 PDT 2006


I'm not actually upset or anything, but I thought I'd give
you an outsider's perspective.

I'm one of the worst offenders here, since I know I broke the build
yesterday which my diva related changes.  I had things working
in one tree, but was not able to test because of a problem in
my other tree on another machine.

Basically, I thought on my other tree I had broken something
and spend several hours tracking down the problem as being that
some geon actors were removed, but geon.xml was not updated.
It took more time than necessary because I upgraded Eclipse
and did a reinstall of ptII and kepler sources so I could 
be sure.  It also took more time because the error message
was a NullPointerException and I had not seen this sort
of error before.

Now, I'm facing problems with Eclipse again?
I'm seeing errors about cipres PAUPInfer class?  

It does not build in Eclipse, so I excluded it, and 
then I had to remove some files from actors
and then trash ~/.kepler and run ant buildkarlib

I eventually did all that stuff and now I was able to work.


A couple of comments:
1) We all, (me especially) need to be more careful about not breaking
the build and Kepler in general

2) Kepler needs to be restructured so that it does not require the
entire library to be present and working at startup.  Ptolemy II does
this so as to avoid problems like PAUPInfer.  I don't know what this
class does, and since I'm not using it, I shouldn't care.  This would
help start up time.  I think that this might possibly be worth
considering implementing before 1.0.

3) The Eclipse instructions are very complex.  We were never able to
help Sivagowri Swaminathan <sivagowri at hotmail.com> to his or my
satisfaction.  BTW - Under Eclipse 3.2.0 (rc1), with java 1.5.0_06,
the svg icons are not visible for me?  Not sure why.

4) The limitation about being able to run only one Kepler because
of the database is troubling.  I'm running on a shared Windows
server.  If I wanted to use Kepler in a class and have students
run on this server, would I be able to?

Anyway, those are some random thoughts.  As I said, I'm not
at all upset about these issues, and I really enjoy contributing
and collaborating with you all.  I think Kepler is pretty slick,
I like what you've done with Ptolemy and appreciate you putting
up with Ptolemy's (and my) ideosyncracies.

_Christopher


More information about the Kepler-dev mailing list