On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 01:02:59AM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
Do you think it would be feasible to exclusively manage an image from SVN sources?
The reason I'm asking is related to the "image" problem I reported earlier, the Linux folks demand the image to be to bootstrapped from sources + media files. Which IMHO would be a major re-engineering effort. E.g.,
Well, it's not a great fit with Squeak, but Smalltalk/X has always worked this way (and probably Gnu Smalltalk too), so clearly it's possible.
But frankly I suspect that a good old fashioned update stream with human-readable change sets applied to some known base system would address most of the perceived problem. If the base system consists of sources plus "media" (a well-recognized image of known heritage), then everything applied subsequently is easily traced, and can be reapplied by anyone interested in doing so.
I would also note that those annoying Linux folks might just have a point here. If we had followed these guidelines consistently over the last few years, we would not have ended up with the mess of lost author initials, untraceable changes, and unidentified licensing that we are faced with today.
I think that Edgar has talked about trying to rebuild Squeak 3.9/10 from changes on top of a solid 3.8 image. I think he has the right idea: fully traceable sources, all in plain text, and easily rebuilt from a known base system. The 3.8 image itself was built from update streams all the way back to an image of known heritage and license status. Really, this is not a bad state of affairs.
Dave