On Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:35:49 +0100, Eliot Miranda wrote:
On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 1:17 AM, edgar De Cleene wrote:
A standard "kernel image" that everyone builds off of has long been a pipe dream of nearly everyone in the community. I believe that such an image is not achievable in the short term; convincing all of the squeak distributions to adopt it would be nearly impossible to adopt incrementally.
Such image exist and is MorphicCore of Pavel Krivanek. We should go towards this , removing packages from the top and reshaping packages if packages as we know today can't be unloades/loaded nicely
Any image containing a GUI is a non-starter IMO. People may not want a GUI (e.g. the embedded and scripting folks). People may want a particular GUI (MVC, Morphic, Tweak, Newspeak, Croquet, one of the native GUIs) with no vestiges of the old one. So the common image needs to be a small headless core that can bootstrap any image. This image needs minimal scripting support to respond to command-line bootstrap commands (including cross-platform stdin & stdout and a file interface), a compiler with which to compile code, collections, magnitudes, exceptions (as necessary), a default error handler that dumps the stack to stdout and then aborts, and that's about it.
All images derived from it should be derived by running scripts (repeatable process).
Sure, and Pavel's has this all, and it's working, no wonder that Edgar often mentions it:
- http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ralph/blogView?entry=3342635112
These scripts should be versioned.
Further, this initial image should be built from scratch, e.g. using John Maloney's MicroSqueak as a starting point.
Interesting. Where is that one, search didn't show it:
- http://www.google.com/search?q=John+Maloney+MicroSqueak
[... much more good stuff cut away ...]