On 7/22/07, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi -
>
> I just spent some in 3.10 and while I felt that there wasn't much that
> personally excited me about it, there were still plenty of fixes that
> were interesting enough for me so that I'll have to spend significant
> time to integrate them into Croquet. And if you look at what has
> recently gone into Croquet [1] I'm pretty sure you'll find the same the
> other way around (for example the font caching fixes come directly from
> Croquet). After looking over 3.10 it again occurred to me how splintered
> the larger Squeak community is when it comes to some of the core parts
> of its software.
>
> I think that at some point we'll have to admit that using individual
> images is a reality that we simply need to accept and deal with it
> accordingly. And one of the key parts is to understand how to share code
> across these different images.
>
> The trouble with code sharing is that the most important packages are
> still completely bound to particular images. There is no "Collection"
> package that I can load in from 3.4 through 3.10 and expect it to work.
> There is no common "Numbers", no "Streams", no "Files", Sockets, Sound,
> Exceptions, anything package. While there are plenty of
> application-level packages that support a range of images, there is
> almost nothing at the core of Squeak that can be used across different
> images.

In fact, there is a Files repository at
http://source.squeakfoundation.org/files/
which is supposed to have merged with http://source.squeakfoundation.org/IO
but hasn't.

There should be a Collection package.  And Numbers and Exceptions.

source.squeakfoundation.org is supposed to be a host for MC repositories
for core packages.  Some of them are more active than others, and a lot
seem to be missing.

I think we can get repositories for other categories IF people
volunteer to manage
them.  But these repositories will work only if the people who
volunteer actually do
the work when it is needed.

When you say "load in from 3.4 through 3.10 and expect it to work" I assume you
mean that it will probably work, but you won't know for sure unless you test it
because 3.4 was built with an earlier version of Collection/Number/etc and it is
possible that the new "improved" version will break something.  If there were a
single Collection repository then someone who used 3.4 could at least load the
latest version and see if it works.  The way things stand, it is
pretty hard for anyone
to even know what to load.

-Ralph