Cees De Groot wrote on Fri, 14 Oct 2005 09:20:14 +0200
> It used to be often that <a user group> was Squeakland, but as far as
> I can tell they're doing quite well catering for themselves at the
> moment. [...]

Just to remove the "won't someone please think of the children!" angle
from this discussion, I would point out that Squeaklanders are already
doing without updates to recent versions:

http://squeakland.org/pipermail/squeakland/2005-September/002756.html

This doesn't really hurt them since they put all their content into
separately saved projects (.pr files) which can then be loaded into more
recent images. In fact, plug-in images can be shared among users which
makes it a bad idea to put any specific content there.

Perhaps other Squeakers could do the same: create a new empty project,
copy everything of interest in the old image there, save the project,
load the new image, load the project, copy everything out of the
project, delete the project, save the image? I am not sure that a
project saved from a 3.6 image will load ok in a 3.8 one with all the
string changes.

Personally, I love that we have a direct line all the way back to
Smalltalk-74 even through several radical changes in the image format
and would be sad to lose that for purely nostalgic reasons. In my own
project I don't have that history but with a Smalltalk machine with
*the* image taking up all the Flash you really, really don't want to
start over on each update. One thing that many people specially liked
about Self (not me, though) was that you could start from an empty image
at any time and rebuild it from the sources (Slate is currently like
that too, as is Little Smalltalk). I see the advantages of both sides of
this issue and would like to see a rational decision.

-- Jecel