On Sun, 18 Jun 2000 11:09:14 -0400 Paul Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>Squeak Central seems to be deeply enamored of shipping big images and
>asking people to shrink them, offering at best a tool for tracing object
>references in an images to copy parts of an image.

Paul,

I think this overstates the case. Much of the demand for things in Squeak comes from the Squeak community ("I have met the enemy and he is us" - Walt Kelly). Most of us have, at one time or another, expressed a desire for something to be included in "the image". Many of us have also expressed a desire for something slimmer with this or that removed. These many sets of additions and removals simply do not resolve to one clear and trivial solution.

>Is this a case of not
>making modularity a priority, or is there some other reason I do not
>understand for wanting to shrink images for deployment? It just seems
>like an ancient holdover to me -- perhaps more a sign of relative
>priorities of distribution vs. exploratory work.

There is actually much work afoot in just this area. We have seen recent changes moving toward Projects as loadable/unloadable packages of code and content isolated in their effect from the rest of the system. Name spaces (or environments) are also evolving in support of this. While all is not complete, the signs are there.

Cheers,
Bob