[KCP] SystemDictionary cleaning: Comments and design

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Wed Jun 11 20:55:16 UTC 2003


Stef,

> Come one andreas
> 
> 	Image abandoneSources
> 
> Does not tell you something?

I'd be looking for a class Image either if I
* look for graphical objects (which are often referred to as "image")
* if I would want to know about what Squeak's representation for its .image
file is (such as in ImageSegment)
but I'd definitely not look for some class "Image" in the context of
#abandonSources. Sorry.

> Please tell me that I'm wrong and stupid to lose my time cleaning 
> Squeak and I stop. Seriously. No joke. I have something else that
> hearing that.

I'm not necessarily saying that. I'm telling you to carefully consider *how*
you clean up things (and I thought you were asking for opinions about this).

To me it seems particularly important to come up with clear concepts for
utility methods that we want to move out of places where they currently
live. These methods are likely to be used from lots of places and moving
them around "randomly" is good recipe for entirely needless
incompatibilities.

SystemNavigation is a good example in this regard - a clear concept,
encapsulating lots of utility methods but clearly scoped. But for those
utility methods where we don't have a clear concept it might be worthwhile
to keep them in SystemDictionary for as long as we need to find a good
concept.

So what I'm rather saying is: Don't force it. If you *do* have a useful
concept that scales then use it (like SystemNavigation). But don't move
methods around randomly just because you think they don't belong in one
place but have no good idea about any other place they might belong to.

Cheers,
  - Andreas



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