On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 5:19 PM, Ralph Johnson johnson@cs.uiuc.edu wrote:
There are two problems with this rule. The obvious one is that the universe gets lots of obsolete versions of packages, and that makes browsing them hard in the Universe browser. This problem can be fixed by a better browser.
There is already a browser which displays the package versions nicely (using 3 panes as with a code browser).
The bigger problem is that it encourages people to live in their image and to depend on updates to fix problems. After many years of Smalltalk programming, I decided to throw away my current image every week and to build a new one. I make sure I can file out all my code and can build a new image from a released image. I know that this cannot be done with the base image. But I think Squeak would be better if it were possible to build a new image from scratch. Unfortunately, that won't happen soon, but I can at least keep any applications I work on from falling into the same problem.
I'm not sure I understand. What is the problem with the squeak-dev images? I build them exactly for this purpose. When I work on a project, I commit to SqueakSource and change the base image at least every week (often every day). IIRC, at netstyle they change their image everyday and new images are built automatically each night.
I would not go so far as to claim that Package Universe should delete the ability to perform updates. But I would say that all old versions can be thrown away, and that people should not expect to be able to update a year old image without breaking something. After all, instead of updating a package, they can just load in a new version.
-Ralph