[V3dot10] [Q] About updates, take 3

[Ralph Johnson]

Eliot, glad to see you here!

As a long-time VW person, I am used to an empty changes file.  The
Squeak people seem to want to have complete history of the image.  As
an academic, I find history interesting, but as a programmer, I
usually want to rewrite history, not relive it.

I have a plan to make everybody happy, i.e. to keep all history but to
have the final version of 3.10 have an empty change file.  The plan is
to put the history of each method in a "history database" that can be
put on the internet or kept locally, and to change the history tool so
that after it searches the changes file, it goes to the history
database.  When we compress changes, we will add the info to the
history database.  Then, we can create a new source file and make the
changes file empty without losing any history.

in fact, we can probably go back and recover all the history from 3.8
so that nobody can complain about what was done in 3.9.

-Ralph