On Sep 9, 2006, at 4:14 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:

> So after all of this energetic opinionating, have you bothered to
> take the time to enable CrLfFileStream in your own image?
> It will
> take you about 20 keystrokes, which could doubtless be improved, but
> is still considerably less that it took me to to compose this note.

No.

But there's a logical reason (or at least, a reason that seemed  
logical within the confines of my own mind).

Previously you said...

> Nowadays, Squeak uses MultiByteFileStream as its default, so  
> changing back
> to to CrLfFileStream might have some bad side effects (I don't know,
> but I'm mentioning it as a caution). It certainly won't work for  
> Squeak's
> multilingual support, but this may not be important for you if you
> mainly work in English.

Which suggests that it would be somewhat risky to switch to  
CrlFileStream. I was worried that there might be unintended side- 
effects--especially on packages loaded from squeakmap, and I don't  
want to make things unstable. As I said earlier, it's easier (or more  
importantly, safer) to just go back to 3.8.

However, there is also a second (and probably more important) reason  
(which I hinted to earlier). It sounds like 3.9 is moving rapidly  
towards a final release. I'm not actually sure what a gamma release  
is--but since most software goes from beta to rc, I guess it's pretty  
close to final.

If 3.9 is released in its current state, then I won't be the only  
person who loads packages, only to be barraged with ugly boxes  
littering their code base. I suspect others will also find this  
disturbing (both from an aesthetics view and from a why-didn't- 
someone-fix-this-I-wonder-what-else-they-missed view). As I said  
elsewhere, I think its important to lower the barrier of entry for  
new Squeakers. It will be a lot easier to convince people to give  
Squeak an honest try if the code base looks clean.

I hate to say it, but appearances are important. And so are first  
impressions.

You're free to ignore everything I've said. But I do think the issue  
is worth thinking about, and I hope it was worth discussing.

-Rich-