Gate Enhanced Inspector support to GemStone 3.7.5+

[ericwinger]

Summary

The Enhanced Inspector support is now limited to GemStone 3.7.5 and later. On older servers Jasper keeps the classic Inspector and never offers to install the enhanced support. The gate is a single semantic version check, so future releases (3.7.6, 4.0, …) are admitted automatically with no list to maintain.

Why we exclude pre-3.7.5 servers

The vendored GToolkit/RSR payload cannot deliver a working Enhanced Inspector below 3.7.5. There are two independent reasons, which together set the floor at 3.7.5:

1. Pre-3.7.0 — the payload won't file in (RSR requirement)

RemoteServiceReplication's RsrAsyncMournHandler references GcFinalizeNotification, a GemStone kernel class introduced in 3.7.0. On 3.6.x that symbol does not exist, so filing in the payload fails to compile (CompileError 1001, undefined symbol GcFinalizeNotification) and the install aborts. In other words, RSR itself requires GemStone ≥ 3.7.0 — it is a 3.7-era component (3.7.x even ships RSR as a bundled project).

2. 3.7.0–3.7.4 — it installs, but shows no views (Unicode/byte string mismatch)

On these servers the payload files in cleanly, but the inspector comes up empty. The cause is a server-side string-encoding behavior, not the payload files (the same files work on 3.7.5):

• On GemStone before 3.7.5, string literals in GCI-compiled queries compile as Unicode strings.
• The payload builds its view dictionaries with byte-String keys.
• These servers raise ArgumentError on a mixed Unicode-vs-byte String = comparison, so the inspector's view lookup (... at: 'views') throws. The error is caught and swallowed, and the inspector renders no views.
• GemStone 3.7.5 compiles those literals as byte String, so the comparison is byte-vs-byte and the lookup succeeds.

Because reason (1) blocks everything below 3.7.0 and reason (2) blocks 3.7.0 through 3.7.4, the first release where the full pipeline (install and views) works is 3.7.5.

We deliberately chose to gate on version rather than paper over the platform behavior in the queries (e.g. coercing every dictionary key to a byte String): that touches many comparison sites, is fragile, and would only mask a server limitation. Gating is the honest, maintainable fix.

What changed

• supportsEnhancedInspector(stoneVersion) / ENHANCED_INSPECTOR_MIN_VERSION (enhancedInspectorInstall.ts) — the single source of truth. Uses the semantic compareGemStoneVersions, extracts the leading numeric token from the raw GciTsVersion string (which carries a trailing build suffix), and pads a short major.minor form so a future "4.0" compares cleanly.
• Three gates:
  • refreshEnhancedInspectorAvailable — the routing latch returns false without even probing on < 3.7.5, so a server that already has the classes (e.g. a shared stone) still falls back to the classic Inspector.
  • maybeOfferEnhancedInspectorInstall — no connect-time offer or auto-install.
  • runInstallEnhancedInspector — reports "requires GemStone 3.7.5 or later" and stops.
• gemstone.enhancedInspectorSupported context key, driven by session selection, hides the Install Enhanced Inspector Support command in the Command Palette on unsupported servers.
• Docs/UX — the walkthrough, the walkthrough step, and the enhancedInspector.autoInstall setting description all note the 3.7.5+ requirement.

Testing

• Version-gate coverage across unsupported (3.6.2 / 3.7.0 / 3.7.2) and supported (3.7.5 / 3.7.6 / 4.0, including short major.minor and build-suffix forms) versions, at every gate: helper, routing latch, offer, auto-install, and manual command.
• The on-demand GCI routing smoke test now uses the stone's real version and asserts the gated routing decision holds across the whole CI version matrix (not just 3.7.5).
• npm run compile clean; full suite green (server / client / mcp) and the on-demand GCI suite green against a live 3.7.5 stone.

[jgfoster]

Hm.. This will be an argument against doing development on 3.6.2!