[squeak-dev] Re: About Configurations

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Tue Jul 13 23:57:07 UTC 2010


On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 11:24:27PM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
> On 7/12/2010 10:17 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote:
> >I thought this was a bang-up idea. Any particular reason the
> >Configurations package hasn't made it into the Trunk? Anything I can do
> >to help?

<snip>

> So I've been thinking if it isn't better to regroup things and define 
> that the stuff that comes with the image is more light-weight than 
> Metacello by default - it may *use* Metacello for installing it where 
> that's desirable but it wouldn't require Metacello for simple things. 
> Instead, it would focus more on those "installer options" that say from 
> a user perspective here are the things that you may want to install and 
> they boil down into some packages.

+1

I like the idea of *encouraging* use of Metacello, but not requiring it
for simple things. The ConfigurationOfWhatever classes are lightweight
and they do document the targets of the configuration nicely, but they
still require loading a good deal of infrastructure before a package can
be loaded.  So I think it is good for the stuff that comes with the image
to be as thin as possible.

As an example fresh from today's postings, consider German Arduino's
SimpleLogger package on SqueakSource. It is admirably small, it seems
useful, and it would work fine on any Squeak/Pharo variant. The
ConfigurationOfSimpleLogger might well be larger than the package
itself. It would be good to permit loading things like this through
the simplest (and fastest) available mechanism.

Dave




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list