A stupid newbie question

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Wed Oct 10 12:22:54 UTC 2001


Russell --

This is the way things were at PARC, but virtue of the "OOZE" 
transactional persistant storage system done by Ted and Dan (good 
writeup by Ted in the old Byte articles). I had never been able to 
get such a thing working perfectly in my thesis system, but Ted and 
Dan reinvented it and did get it right (and pretty ingeniously).
      It happens that an extremely transactional system could be done 
using image segments, especially if most modularization could use 
projects as their transport mechanism. Then the image without any 
projects would be small and quickly checkpointable. This would be 
cool if someone would try doing this.

Cheers,

Alan

-----


At 11:43 AM +1000 10/10/01, Russell Allen wrote:
>"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
>>  The number of files there *are* in an application *once it is installed*
>>  and the number of files the user *has to touch* to make installation happen
>>  are very different things.  The fact that a Squeak application might want
>>  a VM, some sources, an image, lots of pictures, and some squeak-books
>>  doesn't mean that the *user* ever has to touch more than one file.
>
>When I started to use Squeak, it came in four files (VM, image, changes,
>source).  When it ran, it ran within those four files.
>
>Now my four files have grown.  I have another four files for Email, a
>folder called 'prefs' and another folder called 'audio' that have popped
>up from nowhere.  A 'squeaklets' folder has appeared and started to fill
>itself with stuff.  When I run Squeak, misc files such as
>'SqueakDebug.log' appear, change and dissapear.  And (worst of all) a
>folder called 'My Squeak' has appeared in a completely different part of
>my hard drive (although, to be fair I think this is from the browser
>plugin :).
>
>All of these things appear to me to be a function of the fact that the
>image is not stable enough to handle permanent storage of large amounts
>of data.  In a (ok, my :) perfect world my email, audio files, image
>files and preferences would be just more objects in my squeak world, and
>from the point of view of the outside OS I have only two files - VM and
>Image.
>
>A variant of Occam's razor for computers - concepts should not be
>duplicated.  The concept of a file is redundant when we have the concept
>of an object.  Let's deprecate it...
>
>Russell


-- 




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