On 2/9/13 9:43 PM, "David T. Lewis" <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 09, 2013 at 11:51:21PM +0000, Frank Shearar wrote:
>> In the interests of revisiting Pavel Krivanek's work, and a long term
>> goal of this community, I thought I'd use the Dependency Browser and
>> dig out interpackage dependencies.
>> 
>> By scraping the DependencyBrowser's contents together with a bit of UI
>> scripting I've constructed a dotfile of Trunk (attached). Turning this
>> into a PNG results in an 11MB image! [1] Nodes near the top are nodes
>> that aren't used by many things.
>> 
>> For instance, ReleaseBuilder's right at the top because nothing depends on
>> it.
>> 
>> One thing to note is that XML-Parser and Nebraska are only used by
>> Universes, and that Universes isn't used by anything else.
>> 
>> It occurs to me that we could thus remove these 3 packages from trunk
>> and add the loading of these to ReleaseBuilderFor4dot5 [2], and still
>> end up with a 4.5 that while apparently unchanged, actually has a
>> smaller core.
>> 
>> What do you think of trying this out as an experiment? How would we
>> unload these packages? (I should note: I've nothing against these
>> packages. They're just packages that aren't woven into the guts of the
>> image, and are thus easily removable.)
> 
> I would prefer to see the experiment focus on *reloadable* packages,
> in the sense of SmalltalkImage>>unloadAllKnownPackages, where the
> unloaded packages are supposedly distinct enough that they can be
> reloaded after having been removed from the image. Success would
> be defined as being able to unload a package, reload it, and verify
> that the image is equivalent to what you started with. I think that
> the packages you identified are probably good candidates for an initial
> experiment with this.
+1 to both , Frank and David.