[Vm-dev] VM team

[David T. Lewis]

On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 06:02:10PM -0600, Ken G. Brown wrote:
>  
> Maybe now would be the time to go through the plugins and make all the names of source folders, plugin names and generated plugin names more consistent with the convention? Some cleanup would surely improve things for the future by reducing the confusion factor.
> 
> Way back, I was rooting around everywhere learning where things happened and it being the first time through, I was initially quite confused by the following:
> 
> internal plugin B3DEnginePlugin generated as Squeak3D
> internal plugin BalloonEnginePlugin generated as B2DPlugin
> internal plugin BitBltSimulation generated as BitBltPlugin
> internal plugin DSAPlugin generated as DSAPrims
> internal plugin DeflatePlugin generated as ZipPlugin
> internal plugin FFIPlugin generated as SqueakFFIPrims
> internal plugin KlattSynthesizerPlugin generated as Klatt
> internal plugin LargeIntegersPlugin generated as LargeIntegers
> 
> There most likely are more that I missed.

This might be good for some of the plugins that are maintained in the
VMMaker package inself, but in general I worry that we might create
more confusion than we cure. We definitely would not want to change the
actual module names (the 'Bar' part of 'FooPlugin generated as Bar'),
as that would require changes to existing images. It would be OK to
change the class names (the 'FooPlugin' part) in cases where it does
add confusion as to who wrote, owns, or maintains the plugin.

The Pharo folks (I forget who) have started keeping a list of what
plugins are being used where. I think it might be best overall to
adopt that idea - document the plugins better, clarify who maintains
what and where, and finally think about changing naming in cases
where it does not add to the general confusion.

Dave