Whither Squeak?

Torsten Sadowski moehl at akaflieg.extern.tu-berlin.de
Fri May 19 20:10:10 UTC 2006


Hi,

maintainability of large software collection seems always to be a problem
and a magic bullet is yet to be found. It seems you can either choose
between modularity and effectivity. To illustrate this I want to mention 3
Unix systems I'm using:

Debian testing as a managed monolithic system with strong dependencies,
NetBSD as the same with less strong dependencies and
Mac OSX as an unmanaged modular system (at least partly).

Debian and NetBSD are in my opinion managed monolithic systems because
both have a dependency system and file database. That means you can get
completely rid of previously installed software and it works really fine
until someone breaks the dependency system which happen for me from time
to time on Debian and I can't burn CDs or do other stuff for several days
or weeks just because someone thought the minor version is important.
NetBSD is a bit better because software is build from source and you have
not that often to update a dependency.

Now for the big difference OSX. There is no package system from Apple.
Large chunks of software reside in app bundles and frameworks which is
very modular but on the other hand ineffective. If I want to publish
software based on something not in the base system I put everything I need
in the app bundle. And someone else does the same...

I don't really know what this means in a squeak world but dependency
systems and too finegrained modularity don't seem to work.

Cheers, Torsten

P.S. How would you load the preferred UI System into a MVC and Morphic
free system?

On Fri, 19 May 2006, Juan Vuletich wrote:

> In my experience in MorphicSplitters and Morphic Stewards teams, it is
> entirely possible to remove unwanted stuff, but it is very hard to make
> parts unloadable and loadable back easily and cleanly. My Morphic
> Splitting efforts are close to a dead end, because of this and lack of time.
> The only hope is that each part is handled by people who cares about it,
> or simply discarded.



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