> Re: "ENVY system, it counts as the only software ever to piss me off more
than Windows!"

Hi,

Couldn't agree more. While ENVY works wonders like no other source control
system you have to have a certain mind set for using it, namely not much
room for anything else as it fills your brain past the exploding point.
It's model of the world is very complicated since it can do a lot of
different powerful things. For very large projects with many participants
with certain comercial goals it would be nice -- just plan on having a
least two or three people on staff who can dedicated all most all of their
time in the role of an ENVY librarian, administrator and trainer!!
Otherwise it's fantastic. Too bad about the complexity since it means that
each user needs to be trained to be an expert in it. Users also have to
coordinate their activities as a tight nit team to make it really work.

One of the nice capabilities that ENVY has is being able to produce any
release of an application at any point in the development of the
application! Anybody need a new binary of Windows 3.1.1? YICK! If it was
developed using ENVY as the source control system you'd get a new release
of the old release just like that. Lost that old binary, no problemo... How
about version 1.1 of Squeak? 

(Or Digitalk V286 R1.1 which they can't even recompile to fix a memory
problem anymore. They have lost the source code and can't find the person
who used to own on of the significant components of it! V286 seems to be
unable to be unable to handle a pentium machine with more than 32 MB of
ram. It just stopped working on machines with 64MB! Someone patched the 10
year old exe binary to just assume the machine has 16MB!).

------
On the original topic of this subject "Size limit to change": Lets go with
an object for the source code reference which would have a 32 bit file
position (or larger when we move to a 64bit os and use a large Integer) in
either the sources or changes file.) Why not just keep all the source code
changes that you ever make like ENVY does? Why set arbritary limits when we
don't have to? Let's use the existing limit of the os, 32 bits for file
position.

How about something like the following?
	SourceCode class
		ivars:
			file		 "a reference to a file object"
			positionInFile 	"32 bit integer or largeInteger indicating where in the
file to
					find the source code snippit."
			sourceString  	"when we've read in source code cache it here"

Of course you could create a hierarchy of different SourceCode objects that
know about different places to store/retreive the source code.



Peter