Hi Eliot,

On 11/26/2013 7:15 PM, Eliot Miranda wrote:

Hi Florin,

On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 8:35 AM, Florin Mateoc <florin.mateoc@gmail.com> wrote:

I think overrides (a la VW, but they could be done even better)

+1. I was the guilty party that f**ed up the implementation of the VW ones (but then it was my idea also). See http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2010-January/142760.html for a better approach to implementation. Does it make sense to you?

could solve these entanglement problems much easier
(after the initial investment), directly attacking modularity and helping address other issues in this area:
loading/unloading, minimal image, versioning.

Florin

--
best,
Eliot

I actually liked overrides a lot - I should have emphasized that (especially that there are seemingly so many things that I don't like :) - must be the age).
It was, from my point of view, the one saving grace for Store (as compared to Envy, which was otherwise fantastic (and it had atomic loading).

I am sorry, I did not really understand your alternative approach from that message. What I had in mind was, on one hand, to remove any restrictions for what an override can do (I don't remember exactly, but I think there were some unnecessary restrictions), on the other hand, specify in the override itself what it expects the overidee to be. These override expectations should be in the form of source code (method formatted source, class structure...), not versions or some such.
The fact that the override specifies its expectations not only makes it likely that it will work when they are met, but also implies that they were tested in that configuration by their developer. The expectations for each override should be a collection, not a single source, since this would allow to load multiple packages that override the same things. One of the expectations would be the base variation, another would be after a known other package overrode it...

Cheers,
Florin