Hi Dave --

Okay. :-) From what I can read and understand reminds me of my original argument against including the sources file in the image. Conceptually, it should just about moving data from outside from the file system to the image or vice versa. Whatever the use case is. Your initial approach clearly favors the "let's keep it in the image forever" idea. And that's where I disagree. We should keep the design modular, which is not that tricky at the moment. It it might become challenging if we "burn the bridges" by unintentionally. ;-)

Best,
Marcel
Am 25.01.2022 17:31:09 schrieb David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com>:
Hi Marcel,

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 11:27:28AM +0100, Marcel Taeumel wrote:
> Hi Dave --
>
> >??So I think that disabling the preference should simply go back to the
> > traditional way of reading the sources file, nothing more.
>
> And that's not very user friendly. Users that just play around with the settings might disable the cache and then save the image. Boom! They get errors and have no idea where to get the .sources file. Posts on squeak-dev will appear. How remembers the "traditional way" just in time? Not many, I suppose. That issue can easily be avoided. I guess we have all the information. All preferences should work in both states, enabled and disabled. The system should take care of this.
>
> Anyway, you may push the current version into Trunk. :-) But I would really want to tweak the user experience a little bit more to avoid unnecessary surprises. But we can do that later on.
>

I think it may be better to wait until after the release. I do
not want to introduce any new problems or possible confusion right
now, and we can easily back-port it to the support stream if there
is a need.

Meanwhile I will play around with this a bit more and see if I can
make the user experience better.

A possible approach might be:

- user disables the preference
- system checks to confirm availability of a sources file
- if no sources file found, then notify the user and do nothing

Another possible approach:

- user disables the preference
- system checks to confirm availability of a sources file
- if no sources file found, ask user if they want to write a new sources file (it takes a long time)
- if file write fails, notify the user and do not change the preference

Dave


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