On Sunday, August 17, 2003, at 02:24 PM, Michael Rueger wrote:

> Stephane Ducasse wrote:
>
>> I agree with daniel. It is really important for 3.6 to have the same 
>> appeal for beginners than 3.5.
>> As soon as we know that we can remove the packages having a full 
>> image is great. While loading then
>
> Me three, I mean, I agree too.
>
> The absolutely worst thing we could do would be to make it hard for 
> people (not just beginners) to use a full image.
>
> I also think that we need to figure out a way how to keep a full image 
> updated, although we might run into problems there. The network 
> rewrite is a good example where there were certain time periods where 
> someof the packages were broken.
> At least the stable releases have to pass the integration tests 
> (meaning a full image that works with the most uptodate packages).

I've thought of another variation we could consider, sort of similar to 
option #2 but simpler, I'll call it option 2.5:

We add a yes/no prompt to the update stream soon, asking if one wants 
to load the "upgrade to full" script from SqueakMap.  Then we run the 
upgrade-to-full script, or not.  But we only have one update stream 
after that, not a fork.  Really, the update stream *should* be making 
the same updates whether or not you have the Full packages installed, 
so this makes some sense.  We would have both a Full and Basic image 
release for 3.6.  (And whenever a new group of removal updates occur in 
the future, another prompt would follow asking to maintain "full" 
status by re-loading the packages.)

For this to work, we'll want to be strict about making sure none of the 
9 packages overwrite any methods in the base 3.6beta image.  Which I'm 
pretty sure is what we want anyway.  (We should check the current 9 
packages to see if any base image methods are overwritten.)

This still splits the testing community in two, but I'm not sure that's 
a huge problem, we do want the Full image and the Basic image to both 
work reasonably, so they should both be tested.  (Okay, I admit the 
Basic image doesn't need as much testing.)

I guess one problem I have with adding the packages to the update 
stream for 3.6 and then removing them again for 3.7alpha, is that I'm 
not sure it will make sense to keep doing this for future releases.  
Would we want to remove the 9 packages in 3.7alpha, then remove 8 more 
packages later in 3.7alpha, but then add the 17 packages back again in 
3.7beta?  What about 3.8/4.0?  This might be a bit easier if we had a 
real package-unloading capability.

But anyway, if we did the option 2.5 thing I described above, people 
should be able to update full images if they want.  We probably would 
run into some problems as Michael says, but I think it would be 
workable.  For example, people working with full images would need to 
occasionally remember to update their extra packages.

- Doug