<div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 1:35 PM, nicolas cellier <<a href="mailto:ncellier@ifrance.com">ncellier@ifrance.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
This is the idea of replacing a "binary blob" (the image) with an automatically generated "textual blob" (a textual description of the object graph, or a script to reconstruct object graph).<br>
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Is it usable? A maintainer will use diff tools to check difference between two versions.<br>
Unfortunately, a small difference in an Object graph (think graph, not tree) might result in a big difference in textual representation. Such generator should take care to generate minimal textual diffs... That means diffing two general graph, analyzing previous textual representation and producing a textual representation closest to previous one.<br>
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What a maintainer would need, is rather a new diff tool able to perform above operation, find the diffs between two images...<br>
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A tool that analyzes a foreign image and generates a script able to convert this image to the foreign one...<br>
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Not simple, a naive implementation would not work, for example because of sourcePointers, an image is not independant form it's change files...</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Not simple at all! I know this isn't exactly the same as what you are talking about, but I saw some presentations at Smalltalk Solutions dealing with file-based code storage and/or analysis:</div>
<div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre; "><a href="http://www.stic.st/stic?content=sts08Detail#june18Detail">http://www.stic.st/stic?content=sts08Detail#june18Detail</a></span><br>
</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11px; "><a name="8672">Using VisualWorks Store for GemStone Code Management</a></span><br></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11px;"><br>
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11px;"><a name="2413">Porting experience report</a><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11px;"><a name="9225"><p>
Smalltalk Development Tools: Bringing Smalltalk to Eclipse</p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; "><div>I think the consensus was "it's hard!"</div><div><br></div><div>
Rob</div><div><br></div></span></p></a></span></div></div>