On Wed, 1 Sep 1999 15:41:18 +0200 Marcel Weiher <marcel at system.de> wrote:
>I guess it wouldn't be quite as bad if images were much smaller.   
>After all, it really is rather silly to have 5 or more copies of the  
>image, which are probably 99% identical.

Marcel,

While not wishing to argue against improvements in the current architecture, "silly" seems an inappropriate criticism. Given disk prices on the order of US$0.04 per megabyte, the cost of storing an additional image is well under a dollar. I keep lots of images around, both current and earlier releases, both pristine and modified. Often I have more than one up and running concurrently, each particularly suited to the task at hand. I don't see it as a problem, rather I leverage the capacity of my computer to provide an additional level of isolation between potentially conflicting threads of development. Duplicating that level of isolation within one image may take a non-trivial effort to get completely right.

Cheers,
Bob