Ideas, Experiences required for changes managements

John W. Sarkela sarkela at sbcglobal.net
Mon Mar 31 16:11:40 UTC 2003


The deeper issue is that Class structure is typically an organization
scheme that is orthogonal to a functional/utilitarian scheme.

 From a usage/loading point of view, one wishes to manage source
code based on the function points that it introduces into the system,
rather than *all* of the class structure of *all* of the affected 
classes.

For example, a well defined framework will commonly extend
the behavior of base classes like Object or Collection.
Thus, for the purposes of managing functional chunks of
code, one almost certainly needs to store and access code
based upon a functional capability point of view, rather than
a runtime hierarchical structure point of view.

It was for these reasons that SWT used build scripts to load
functional elements of the image and used the ginsu module
mechanism to handle modules that could contain "loose methods"
that extended the behavior of existing classes. It further
ensured that each definitional element of code was uniquely
defined in the image. This is required to avoid problems of
one module "stepping on" definitions from previously loaded
modules.

Cheers,

:-}> John Sarkela

On Monday, March 31, 2003, at 07:26 AM, jennyw wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 09:30:49AM +0100, goran.hultgren at bluefish.se 
> wrote:
>> Yep. Well, Squeak doesn't "play" that well with filebased source
>> management tools.
>> In Squeak we now have DVS which essentially is a "smart"
>> file-in/file-out mechanism which makes it at least practical to use 
>> CVS
>> or any other filebased source management tool - but it is still not a
>> perfect fit and will probably never be.
>
> This isn't so much a suggestion as a potentially dumb question, but ...
>
> If there was an option to filed-out in a directory structure instead of
> a single file, such as:
>
> category/classname/classdef
> category/classname/methodcategory/method1
> category/classname/methodcategory/method2
> etc.
>
> And filed-in in the same manner, wouldn't source control systems be 
> able
> to handle that better?  I know this probably wouldn't work well in CVS
> (since it doesn't support renames), but with Subversion (successor to
> CVS), BitKeeper, or a number of more recent CMS systems, it might work
> better.  Or not?
>
> Jen
>



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