Proposal for the coming versions

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Mon Mar 13 19:59:16 UTC 2006


Cees de Groot wrote:
> Personally, I would point my finger at the use of MC instead of MC
> itself (MC seems to be not fit for a particular purpose its creators
> probably never reckoned with).

According to Colin "Monticello was designed with maintaining live system 
in mind" (see 
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-February/101067.html)

> Anyway, I wasn't assigning "blame", I
> was just remarking that there was a conflict here.

Me neither. As I've said in the past, MC is good for what MC is good for 
(namely managing source code in a "build" environment) but it strikes me 
that you're proposing to apply it in just the way where it doesn't work 
very well. But of course, that's just my experience. YMMV.

> Nope. My idea is that during "fast development", the team leader just
> publishes images. And probably an MCC map or something similar showing
> how the image is put together. So the user would effectively have to
> download the image to hop across major upgrades. Minor upgrades would
> likely be doable by just udating using the MCC map. For some value of
> "major" and "minor", of course :)

Um ... I might be slow or something but can you explain to me again how 
this makes things simpler/easier/whatever? Where is (in terms of pain 
associated with it) the difference between having that MCC map and 
posting it to an update stream? (unless you don't do it at all ;-)

And using images this way ... uh, oh. I have a *really* bad feeling 
about this one. You're right, it's often easier to do things in your 
image and distribute that image. It's also a sure way of making it 
impossible for anyone to track ongoing development, the release 
progress, and the history of how things evolved in the image. All of 
which are (in my understanding) very desirable properties. I fear that 
this will lead to a process where you hand off "the image vX.Y" to a 
small group of people (possibly one) and get back "the image vX.Y+1" and 
hardly anyone will have looked at anything at all, noticed the oddities, 
which clean ups are required along the way etc. Not saying that many 
people today track the changes very closely but I even that seems 
preferrable to a process where you don't get to see anything and have no 
documentation of the changes the "official" image went through.

> Yes, that's bad (for people with low bandwidth, for starters).
> However, it buys time to fix the issues with Monticello, so that
> hopefully later on a "upgrade v.X to v.Y" button can be reinstated. 

Nice try. You know just as well as I do that this ain't gonna happen ;-) 
If only because when you give people the ability to modify an image "at 
home" they'll use it for *precisely* those changes that are hard to deal 
with in Monticello. Otherwise, why not use Monticello to begin with?

Cheers,
   - Andreas



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