----- Original Message -----
From: "Ned Konz" <ned at bike-nomad.com>
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 10:49 PM
Subject: Re: Why whole system dumps to image?


> On Tuesday 29 July 2003 02:56 pm, Jens Pall wrote:
>
> > I'm fairly new to Smalltalk and Squeak and I like what I have seen
> > so far. But there is one thing I've been wondering about and that's
> > the image file. The notion of having to dump the _whole_ system if
> > I want to keep my state seems to me just plain dumb (sorry) :). Is
> > this an artifact of piggybacking on a host OS? Some sort of
> > versioning system with branches like CVS seems more appropriate, or
> > some kind of database.
>
> Well, state includes more than source code. You can get a lot done in
> Squeak without ever writing Smalltalk.

Yes, exactly. Even though I mentioned CVS as an example I wasn't only
thinking about source code, rather I was pointing out how the versioning
system in CVS works (and without the merging of file wich could prove
difficult with binary objects). Something along the lines of an object
oriented database would be more like it.

>
> We do have (several) different strategies for source-code management;
> the most promising (and probably most popular) is Monticello. This
> lets you use CVS as a storage medium (get the MonticelloCVS package
> too), or even a directory that then gets snapshot files stuck in it,
> or an HTTP repository server.

I haven't looked at Monticello but I presume it only works on text files,
right? I would rather not loose the notion of an object (a text file is not
an object in my mind) so this is a bit limited, i.e. I have to dump the code
outside of Squeak.

>
> And then we have the ability to save, publish, and share entire
> projects: all the objects in a project (including all the source code
> changes in its current change set if you want).

Yes, that's a big value, but I'm not saying that an image per se is bad but
how it is currently done is not very pleasing (the dump). I would rather see
something that updates the image incrementally and intelligently. This would
be active all the time when Squeak was running so I would never have to ask
for the state to be saved. You could have checkpoints and branches to be
able to back up in time etc. so you get the same features as you now have
with the single images. Of course this is a bit more complex than it is now
:)

Cheers,
Jens