Windows Goodies Bounty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Update (2011-06-30 09:21 EST): Our initial review of Cincom-provided “Windows Goodies 7.9 – 1″ suggests that a resolution is, indeed, valid and functional, so this bounty has been revoked. I hope to try this again some day, it would have been a fun experiment.

Update (2011-06-29 12:12 EST): James Savidge advises that a proposed fix is being integrated into the most current build of VisualWorks this week and will be available to customers shortly. As a result, this bounty is currently on hold pending our review of the update.

Original Post,

A little while back I’d reported an issue with RequestingPrinter (part of Windows Goodies) to VWNC mailing list,

“all of the below code was tested in clean visual.im in 7.8 and 7.7.1;
just paste into the workspace and work away”
Parcel loadParcelByName: 'Windows Goodies'
"if you execute the below, select a printer and proceed,
7.8 will experience primitive failure in 1201, but successfully
return a print job in 7.7.1"
"the below will also fail with exact same error when running 7.7.1
image on a 7.8 VM, so it appears to be a VM issue in 7.8"
RequestingPrinter startPrintJobNamed: 'test'

I’d later received a response from Alan Knight suggesting that,

The problem with that is that Windows Goodies explicitly assembles a host printer handle, which is an opaque VM structure, out of the Windows handles that it gets back. The structure of that opaque handle changed in 7.8 (primarily because of changes made to accomodate 64-bit Windows), so the assumptions that that goodie makes are longer valid. We’re in the process of investigating how to make that work.

Now, we have a few options to consider if we want to continue moving to VisualWorks 7.8 (and we do),

1. Assume that folks at Cincom are actively working on this issue and wait for a resolution
2. Dedicate an internal resource to fixing it and push other projects back
3. Assign a bounty to this and let someone from the community hack at it

I’m not a big fan of the first two, so we’d like to give the third option a try.

DeepCove Labs will pay an equivalent of CAD $400 (four hundred Canadian dollars) to whomever delivers an updated version of Windows Goodies with RequestingPrinter that works in VisualWorks 7.8 and, of course, we’ll contribute that version back to VisualWorks for others to make use of.

Frankly, I’d never posted a bounty like this before, thus, exact logistics aren’t clear to me, so if you have any questions and/or comments, please don’t hesitate to comment and I’ll do my best to address them.

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