Hi Tim --
I would suggest that we should only save preferences that are changed from the defaults, rather than the current 'save everything including several copies of some kitchen sinks I found lying around'.
When carrying over those saved preferences between Squeak releases, those original defaults might have changed. Thus, a complete export seems to make more sense... as it will be more robust?
Best, Marcel Am 01.09.2023 19:23:08 schrieb Tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org: We seem to have drifted away from this but I think it deserves more discussion.
Keeping preferences in methods in thus potentially in MC packages has some attraction because it immediately makes it trivial to share your preferences at various levels - personal, group, global - and of course the change detection in MC makes it easy to see what ... changed. So +quite a lot for usefulness, -a little for the 'everything is a nail' approach.
It's probably worth remembering that MC can store stuff other than methods, though so far as I know it can't do change detection on anything else.
We shouldn't forget that we also have an external preferences mechanism that has been sitting there for twenty years with minimal actual use; see ExternalSettings. I use that for a work related project and my MC login. I don't think it gets a lot of use otherwise. We could certainly beef it up. For example, make it able to search a bit more widely for the directory it reads from so one could have the same local, group, global storage hierarchy. Or actually improve the very simplistic format of the preference values, maybe using json?
I would suggest that we should only save preferences that are changed from the defaults, rather than the current 'save everything including several copies of some kitchen sinks I found lying around'.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim The downside of being better than everyone else is that people tend to assume you're pretentious