In message <200010101743.NAA29161 at cleon.cc.gatech.edu>
          "Lex Spoon" <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:

> For what it's worth, making SoundPlugin external doesn't seem like that
> big of a deal for me.  I know it's just an example, but for this
> example, who cares?
Good question, so I'll try to provide a good answer; imagine you have
deployed squeak systems. Millions of them. Tens of millions :-) Hundreds
of millions! The whole world! Everyone ever... err, excuse me, I'll calm
down now.
There is a bug (oh no! surely not!) related to
sound/sockets/serialports/whoosits. How are you going to fix it without
making life miserable for your _very_ sysadmin-inexpert users?

My (partial, tentative) solution is to make as much as possible modular
so that new modules can be distributed and installed whilst the system
keeps running. VM plugins are a part of this concept and I want to see
as much as possible in plugins. I know that you can override an internal
plugin with an external one, but this is no good on restricted storage
devices. Can't spare the room for duplicative redundancy.

> 
> I'd definately like a choice in *future* plugins.  Then again, on Unix,
> I don't see the big deal about making everything external.  The internal
> plugins stuff seems aimed towards platforms where internal plugins are
> a pain.  Arguably, we don't need to support at it all on Unix....
Couldn't agree more. THe only value of internal plugins is in two
cases:-
a) the platform cannot support external ones  - I think Yoshiki has this
problem with the Zaurus for example
b) the platform's users are too stupid to be trusted with the complexity
of downloading a dozen files instead of 4-5 files.

I rather suspect that for Mac & Windows it would be possible to make
the plugins either live in some resource-fork kind of doohickey, or to
find a tolerable install program that would hide the awful complexity.
Hell, I'll donate the second half of my pay from the squeakbook towards
paying for it (the first half is promised towards the party) if that
makes it any more possible!

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Change is inevitable....except from vending machines.