In the interests of revisiting Pavel Krivanek's work, and a long term goal of this community, I thought I'd use the Dependency Browser and dig out interpackage dependencies.
By scraping the DependencyBrowser's contents together with a bit of UI scripting I've constructed a dotfile of Trunk (attached). Turning this into a PNG results in an 11MB image! [1] Nodes near the top are nodes that aren't used by many things.
For instance, ReleaseBuilder's right at the top because nothing depends on it.
One thing to note is that XML-Parser and Nebraska are only used by Universes, and that Universes isn't used by anything else.
It occurs to me that we could thus remove these 3 packages from trunk and add the loading of these to ReleaseBuilderFor4dot5 [2], and still end up with a 4.5 that while apparently unchanged, actually has a smaller core.
What do you think of trying this out as an experiment? How would we unload these packages? (I should note: I've nothing against these packages. They're just packages that aren't woven into the guts of the image, and are thus easily removable.)
frank
[1] If you have dot installed, `dot -Tpng -o trunk-deps.dot trunk-deps.png` will do the trick. [2] Installer squeak package: 'trunk'; install: '39Deprecated-ar.19'; install: '311Deprecated-nice.2'; install: 'XML-Parser-ael.35'; install: 'Nebraska-ul.35'; install: 'Universes-nice.45'.