Scratch

Hi guys!

I had a great time this week teaching my kids using Google's Blockly, but decided it was time to get the full effect and start using Scratch.

I'm not on an apt- or rpm-based distro, so I used the GPL source download:
http://download.scratch.mit.edu/scratch-1.4.0.6.src.tar.gz

After extracting, there was no README or top-level executable (this should be documented or fixed, I think), but I found src/scratch.

Running that revealed another issue (which is also not documented anywhere that I could see), that it expects Squeak installed into /usr/local/squeak/*.

After installing it, the src/scratch executable did run, but we quickly found an error when attempting to save or open:

(Sorry for the manual image links, the BB refuses to let me link them because I'm a new user):

http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=37512

I know a tiny bit of Smalltalk so I clicked "Debug" and got this far:

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=37513

Notice how t1 is nil. This clearly should not be the case, and is what causes the "findTokens" error.

I looked at UserHomeFolder, and saw that it was indeed nil, but that the code checks "notNil ifTrue return 'Home' localized".

This seems exactly backwards of what it should do.  So I reversed the logic:

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=37514

After that, I got successful saves and opens.


So, where do I go to discuss sharing this information with the community (that is, I want to document the Linux install process better, perhaps embed the Squeak dependency right into the install archive, and switch that ifTrue to an ifFalse).

Thanks!
-☈