Monticello, SM2, BFAV in 3.7alpha

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Tue Jan 27 03:32:21 UTC 2004


On Jan 26, 2004, at 7:08 PM, Brian T Rice wrote:

> The Monticello aspect of the issue is different, and I agree there is 
> no
> need for it to be in Basic, but a standard full image would be more 
> useful
> with it than without.

Right.  What we really need to decide is how to handle things that are:

a) Generally agreed to be useful (to developers anyway; let's leave 
endusers out of this for the moment)
but
b) Not depended upon by large amounts of other code
and
c) Maintained as discrete packages outside of the core image

There are potentially a lot of things that fall into this category - 
Monticello, SUnit, the Refactoring Browser, and so on.  To provide the 
best user experience, we really do want to be it very easy to load 
these things. More than that, actually - I think we also want to make 
it obvious that they are available to people that pick up Squeak for 
the first time, rather than buried in a list of 376 (and counting) 
SqueakMap packages.

One possible solution would be to start bundling a semi-populated SM 
cache directory with the standard image download, and to have world 
menu items ("open TestRunner", etc) that automatically load the 
appropriate package from the cache when they are chosen.  This will be 
particularly useful once SM2 gets a dependency mechanism and we can 
ensure that these packages will also be loaded before any other 
packages that need them (ie, when you try to load a package with tests, 
SUnit will be loaded first).  You could also have SM be smart enough 
to, for example, load Monticello in advance of any .mcz file install 
(or, since I think Göran's main concern was with package upgrades and 
not installs, it could restrict itself to loading MC in advance of any 
.mcz *upgrades*).

Although I don't think this is finally all that different from bundling 
these packages into Basic (and we should still be careful to keep the 
number of auto-loading packages fairly small, IMO), it may provide a 
distinction that is socially (and possibly even legally) useful .

Avi



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