Ok, I'm opening the Unstable Squeak project up again.  Not that much 
has changed since the last time: the USSClient has been tweaked a bit, 
and the bootstrap image includes an experimental version of Monticello 
that adds a binary code representation to its packages as well as the 
usual chunk format.  This speeds loading up by quite a lot.  It also 
doubles the size of the .mcz files, so I'm afraid that anyone on 
dial-up is probably going to be left out in the cold by this particular 
experiment.

Note that because the existing versions on SqueakSource *don't* have 
this binary format, they'll still be slow to load at first, although 
once you have them in your package-cache it should be much faster.  And 
as we commit more new versions to the repository, things will get 
faster even when you don't have anything cached.

I've put up a new bootstrap image that you can grab, or you should be 
able to just load these two packages into your old image if you 
downloaded it last time:

http://beta4.com/mc/monticello/Monticello-avi.207.mcz
http://www.squeaksource.com/uss/UnstableSqueak-avi.9.mcz

For anyone that doesn't know what I'm talking about, the original 
Unstable Squeak article is here:

http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/39.html

I will also note: we already know from Andreas that changes that are 
heavily order dependent (modifying the infrastructure itself, for 
example, or introducing changes that need a lot of initialization) 
don't work well with this model.  That's something that would have to 
be fixed if we were ever going to use this "for real".  But since we 
know that it's broken, let's try to step around those particular broken 
spots, and not commit anything that falls into those categories.  It 
may be that we find that restriction too frustrating, but that'll tell 
us something too.

Cheers,
Avi