Alan,
Are you aware of a process called "configuration managment"?
Yes. So what?
For Squeak to be a viable commercial alternative (never mind the performance issue)
A viable commercial alternative to what? On your advice, I'll ignore the performance issues, whatever that means. I'm pretty sure that the UN council on racism is discussing it this week. I'm assuming that the performance issues you speak of must have something to do with the racist attitudes of the civilized world against the mighty tyranical oppressors.We'll stop those fascists !!!
it must be clearly documented and well controlled.
When somebody tells me "something *must* be ... " in the software arena, I know I'll be much happier just ignoring them. Well controlled? Who is supposed to be doing this controlling? I like free range software, thank you very much. Dude, you just downloaded Squeak, you might be polite enough to:
a) ignore it and hope it goes away b) learn a little bit about it, what it is, and how to use it or c) make it do what you want
If you're trying to rewrite a minimalist DOS like operating system on a ten year old Windows 3.11 based machine, I'll save you a lot of time and trouble. Squeak is not an appropriate vehicle. You should be coding in assembler, or you should look into something like Charles Moore's ColorForth which can run your entire OS from a floppy. From what you've written so far to the list, you might be better served to just write straight to binary. That way, your code will be as fast and space efficient as you can possible make it, and you want have to worry about those pesky optimizing assemblers attacking your code.
Jim