I am a fascinated Squeak-newbie bursting with questions.  I have lots of Smalltalk experience, but in other dialects (VA & VW).  I'm finally ready for Squeak, but am still trying to get familiarized with my new environment.  I have a couple of questions.

- What are some best-practices for maintaining my code in a safe-as-ENVY way.  If I'm writing new code every day that I do not want to lose, is it reliable enough to simply back up my changes file every day?  Or do I need to file-out all of my ChangeSets for a more reliable recovery should the need arise.  I imagined there would be some sort of automatic recovery script that would re-apply all changes in the changes file after the timestamp of the image save, similar to the "Make Image Consistent" command in an Envy-based environment.  I noticed a couple of interesting methods:

 Utilities applyUpdatesFromDisk

wants to pull fileouts out of a folder named 'updates', accounting for the version number tag appended when I file out a ChangeSet.  So this doesn't seem to be intended for the changes file.

I also noticed:

 Smalltalk recover: 100000

but this doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for either.  Is there something else I can use?  I noticed there are code-elements known as a "projects" but my naive understanding about their intent is to have multiple "desktop" displays.  They offer no code-management advantage over ChangeSets.  Is this correct?

- What is the best way to minimize method collisions when extending base classes?  I have used two-character method prefixes in other Smalltalks.  It was effective and tolerable for me, but I think I would feel like I was littering the simple and gorgeous world of Squeak if I did it there.  Does anyone have have an opinion about this?

- The same question also applies to classes.  I saw the article about "Environments" on the Swiki.  But it appears that "root environment" (Smalltalk) is not an instance of Environment, but of SystemDictionary, so I was unable to makeSubEnvironmentNamed:.  

I welcome and appreciate your input..

  - Chris Muller




---------------------------------
Do You Yahoo!?
Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctionsfor all of your holiday gifts!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20011219/68f0ce12/attachment.htm