[Newbies] My customisation conundrum

[David T. Lewis]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 04:07:04AM -0700, Nick Smith wrote:
> 
> I'm a newbie to programming and I'm really enjoying learning Squeak, Seaside. 
> One of the biggest delights for me is discovering just how expressive and
> powerful Smalltalk is when you can so easily add your own methods to the
> base classes.  By using good intention-revealing selector names, I can write
> code that is almost self-explanatory.... like prose but not in the language
> of Smalltalk, in the language of the application/problem domain itself. 
> This is brilliant.  Every program you write is it's own DSL.
> 
> So here's the thing I don't yet understand.  If I embrace this way of
> programming and extend bases classes by adding my own methods, what happens
> to those methods when I upgrade my image to a newer version of Squeak?  Is
> it that I need to subclass existing base classes before extending them (to
> better separate my code from the original) or perhaps I need to learn to use
> Traits; or is there something about Monticello that allows me to migrate my
> custom methods to newer images?  Or maybe perhaps there's something I've
> missed completely.

You will want to learn about change sets and Monticello. Here are some
explanations of change sets:

  http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/785
  http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/946
  http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/674

and Monticello:

  http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1287
  http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/43

I would suggest getting comfortable with change sets as a first step.

Dave