Utility vs Bloat

Chris Reuter cgreuter at calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Thu Jul 15 02:09:11 UTC 1999


On Tue, Jul 13, 1999 at 06:02:18PM -0400, Jeff Szuhay wrote:
> At 1:45 PM -0700 7/13/99, Stephen Pope wrote:
> >Every multi-developer software package has to face the issue that Peter
> >raised: utility vs. bloat.
> 
> Hmm... this is just one more reason to have a "component-oriented"
> environment rather than an all-or-nothing monolithic one
> (my impression of the current image arrangement).
> 
> In fact that's my biggest problem with fully adopting Squeak...
> the monolithic image issue.
> 
> Both problems of "utility vs bloat" and "code reuse", to my little mind,
> would be nicely addressed if Squeak had a component oriented
> architecture. In this way, developers and users could add what _they_
> wanted _when_ they wanted it. In particular developers could easily
> build a "standard" environment adding their parts to it for a shippable
> application.

Squeak already provides a means of punting lots of extras included
with the image.  Unfortunately, getting rid of unwanted classes breaks
(used to break?) the update process.  

Perhaps, as a quick+dirty solution, Squeak Central could add the
method "discardExtras" method to SystemDictionary which throws away
everything experimental or not widely useful (IMHO everything except
Morphic and the development environment) and fix the update mechanism
so that it will just ignore the missing subsystems.  Then, whenever
a new version is released, you can create a smaller image and
transcript automatically and put them up on the ftp site as well.


			     --Chris

....quick technical fixes for social problems 'R' us...





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