Hello all,

Ok, somebody used the "f-word" - fork<g> recently, and there have 
been posts that seem to suggest that modules aren't doing well.  
As I read that more, I'm slowly starting to believe it, though I don't 
follow the test pilot updates and so wouldn't know on my own.  I've 
been busy doing various things, and my Squeak related efforts 
have been aimed mostly at my unsignalled Delay problem.

When I first looked at 3.3alpha and at modules, I had two 
questions: (1) how do I make and save one of these things; (2) 
where's the GUI (even a poor one) for doing same. 

To adapt some very good advice that I was given a few years ago, 
"whatever you do, make sure somebody can save a package (or 
whatever you want to call it) on their local disk in a directory of their 
choosing, and later load it back into another image".  The nature of 
the original advice is very off topic, but that's about how it would 
read here.  It was good advice :)   

Change sets are fine, but something that does not require quite so 
much maintenance would be nice, as would something that 
understands dependencies.  What else is necessary I'm not sure.  
Squeak Map sounds like it does a lot of the right things.  

It would be nice to see Squeak arrive as a small "kernel" image 
and lots of packages that can be loaded as needed.  With Dolphin, 
I found it helpful/necessary to write a tool I call Migrate that 
decides which packages need to be loaded to build the "next 
image".  The essential part of it is to semi-autmatically mine the 
current image to write a script that can be filed into the new image 
to load the packages in a (perhaps the) correct order.  The loader 
has a GUI and there are some debugging features in it.  Whatever 
system eventually partions Squeak, it should be at least tolerant of 
similar tools.  The more granular the image, the more important it 
is to have good tools for getting from one image to another.

I hope this helps, and appologize if I'm contributing to FUD.  If 
that's the case, it's unintentional.

Bill



Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: bills at anest4.anest.ufl.edu
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029