On Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:35:49 +0100, Eliot Miranda wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 1:17 AM, edgar De Cleene wrote:
>
>>
>> > A standard "kernel image" that everyone builds
>> > off of has long
>> > been a pipe dream of nearly everyone in the community. I
>> > believe
>> > that such an image is not achievable in the short term;
>> > convincing all of the squeak distributions to adopt it
>> > would be
>> > nearly impossible to adopt incrementally.
>> >
>>
>> Such image exist and is MorphicCore of Pavel Krivanek.
>> We should go towards this , removing packages from the top and reshaping
>> packages if packages as we know today can't be unloades/loaded nicely
>
>
> Any image containing a GUI is a non-starter IMO.  People may not want a  
> GUI
> (e.g. the embedded and scripting folks).  People may want a particular  
> GUI
> (MVC, Morphic, Tweak, Newspeak, Croquet, one of the native GUIs) with no
> vestiges of the old one.  So the common image needs to be a small  
> headless
> core that can bootstrap any image.  This image needs minimal scripting
> support to respond to command-line bootstrap commands (including
> cross-platform stdin & stdout and a file interface), a compiler with  
> which
> to compile code, collections, magnitudes, exceptions (as necessary), a
> default error handler that dumps the stack to stdout and then aborts, and
> that's about it.
>
> All images derived from it should be derived by running scripts  
> (repeatable process).

Sure, and Pavel's has this all, and it's working, no wonder that Edgar  
often mentions it:

- http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ralph/blogView?entry=3342635112

> These scripts should be versioned.
>
> Further, this initial image should be built from scratch, e.g. using John
> Maloney's MicroSqueak as a starting point.

Interesting. Where is that one, search didn't show it:

- http://www.google.com/search?q=John+Maloney+MicroSqueak

[... much more good stuff cut away ...]

-- 
"If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it".  
Albert Einstein