On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Bob Arning wrote:

> Perhaps we worry too much about forks, but it seems to me that "forks"
> is a fair description of the future of Squeak that seems to be emerging.
> As things get removed from "the" image and "the" image becomes many
> images with various combinations of packages loaded, the amount that any
> two of has in common will likely decrease. That sounds like a lot of
> forks to me.

But a fork has nothing to do with how much any two images have in common -
it has to do with how much they conflict.  Having spent the morning
writing tests for conflict detection in a version control system :), let
me give you an example:  if I have image 1 with packages ABC, and image 2
with packages ADE, that's not a fork - anything built on top of image 2
would work just fine on image 1, possibly after loading in packages D and
E.  The only problem is when you have an image with ABC and another with
AB'C, and then you start building stuff on top of both B and B' at the
same time.... As long as people try to update their packages to work with
the most recent stable releases of their dependencies, everything should
be fine.

To put it another way: would you consider two separate installs of Debian
to be forks?

Avi