Hi,

Stefan Rieken <StefanRieken at SoftHome.net> wrote:

> Ideas:
> 1: How about a VM that optionally handles compressed images/ changes /
> souces files etc.? Compressing mechanisms could be coded in a few 100
> kb, and it could reduce your Squeak directory with a few Mb.

The code is already in there under the browser catageory System-Compression.  

Without knowing better I'll guess that the image could be stored compressed very easily
since you read that completely into memory.  The Changes and Sources files are a bit 
harder since the system stores offsets into the current files and only reads the necessary 
bits when requested.  This is much harder to do with streamed compression, you basically
have to read from the beginning to find an uncompressed byte offset in a file.  That could
be slow.  OTOH, processors are getting faster so maybe this isn't so bad these days.   

You can make your sources and changes file smaller if you do a Smalltalk condenseSources.
The downside is that you only will then have the most recent version of the source for 
a method.  Look at SystemDictionary condenseSources.

You can also run without sources and Squeak will decompile methods for you.  You lose
temporary variable names and comments but it does work :-)


> 4: The introduction window of the Squeak images refers to a ReadMe.txt
> file that is only included in Windows versions (and possibly Mac, but
> not Linux for sure). Please make clear you need this readme for all
> versions, so that newcomers are not directly faced with a Squeak that
> can't find the introduction file.

That shouldn't happen.  I'm making up new bundles (sit, tar, zip) for the 2.5 release 
and I'l make sure that they all have the ReadMe.txt file inside. 

cheers

bruce