[Squeakfoundation]base image distribution

[Stephen Pair]

> The directions you are talking about are not theoretical, 
> that's where it's going. In order for the process to work 
> though, we have to work within some constraints:
> 
> 1. People contribute to Squeak because they can run it and 
> play with it, and modify it, and on it, they also get all 
> this cool Stuff. Therefore, SqueakMap comes before any 
> stripping. StableSqueak ignored this constraint, and that 
> alone was a big risk. We're past that step. 2. People want to 
> run some complicated things that require lots of 
> infrastructure, like Celeste (HTML, networking, MailMessage, 
> Morphic, FileSystem...). We are not the Forth crowd, where 
> users are happy if they get multiplication of Floats in the 
> library (just kidding!). Therefore, no serious stripping 
> before we get some working mechanism for 
> distributions/configurations. 

No doubt, I'm in agreement with you.  I'm just starting to separate the
concepts of a "base Squeak" from a "SqC distribution" of Squeak.  The
"base Squeak" should shrink in size over time, while the SqC
distribution can do whatever SqC decides they should do with it.  The
SqC distribution would be the normal out of the box experience that new
users to Squeak would get; not the base Squeak.  Does that make sense?

> 3. While we work to make Squeak more malleable to more 
> people, we need to make sure we don't turn it into putty 
> nobody can build anything on. If there is no mail client in 
> Squeak, just in SM, that's fine. If there's no one socket api 
> to work against, we have a serious problem.
> 
> Stephen, I think people starting to build their own images 
> from base + packages could be a great accelerator for all the 
> reasons you mention. After we get configurations, this work 
> will be easily sharable, too.

Yes, but I can't see any reason not to get started on this now...a few
scripts to take the base Squeak, update it, load a few packages from
SqueakMap, and publish to an FTP or HTTP server directory should be
fairly easy to do right now. 

> Do you want to try it out and publish your process so people 
> can repeat it and improve on it?

Yes, but I also have a few higher priority items to take care of first.
I'll get to it when I can...it happens to fit into my plans for the next
major upgrade of Swiki.net (I want to build and test my Swiki.net image
on a nightly basis like this) so it should happen within 3-4 months.

- Stephen