2006-02-24

Chronos Version B1.60 Published

Version B1.60 of the Chronos Date/Time Library has been published. It's available from the Chronos web site, or from the Cincom Public StORE Repository. You will also need to obtain and install the Chronos Time Zone Repository according to the Chronos Installation Instructions, if you have not done so previously.

Version B1.60 mostly includes changes and additions to address issues that have arisen in porting Chronos to non-VisualWorks Smalltalk implementations. It also includes some minor and/or obscure bug fixes.

Note also that the URLs for dowloading both the Chronos archive and the Chronos Time Zone Repository archive have changed. The new URLs are as follows:
The Chronos codebase is now also available in a file-out format that should be directly consumable by non-VisualWorks Smalltalk platforms. VisualWorks refers to this format as the "VW3.0" format. It should be completely compatible with the original "Blue Book" file-out format, and I have verified that it is consumable by Squeak, Dolphin and Smalltalk/X.

The "platform-neutral" version of the Chronos distribution is called the "Chronos Seed." You can obtain the latest Chronos Seed Archive from http://www.chronos-st.org/downloads/Chronos-Seed.zip.

The files in the "Chronos Seed" archive are as follows:

  1. Chronos.st: The platform-independent code of Chronos. Chronos will not be functional with only this code installed. To make a functional version of Chronos, you must do the tasks specified in the Chronos Porting Instructions, and you must file-in Chronos-Class Initialization.st and Chronos-Installation.st (but see the comments below before doing that!)

  2. Chronos-Class Initialization.st: Class initializaion methods, and "do its" that execute them on file-in. This code is necessary, but you will need to avoid execution of the "do its" unless and until your port is sufficiently functional.

  3. Chronos-Installation.st: Code that causes Chronos to fully initialize and install itself on file-in. You must avoid execution of this code until your port is sufficiently functional.

  4. Chronos-VW-Extensions.st: Useful extensions to base VisualWorks classes. Optional--and this file is specific to VisualWorks. However, it is probably a good idea to add analogous extensions to the target Smalltalk environment (although that is not at all required.)

  5. Chronos-ST80 (and VW) Compatibility.st: Adds methods to various Chronos classes so that they will be type-compatible with the VisualWorks Date, Time and Timestamp classes. Optional--and this file is specific to VisualWorks. However, you may want to add methods to Chronos so that some of the Chronos classes will be type-compatible with the native Date/Time classes of the target platform.

  6. Chronos-Utilities.st: Contains the code for the Chronos Time Zone Compiler. Optional--and hopefully, not VisualWorks specific.
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