Avi Bryant <avi at beta4.com> wrote:
> 
> 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?

I agree completely with Avi. The important thing here is to maintain a
SINGLE base kernel image.
And then to maintain a FEW "blessed" base image configurations that
people can build on. We can of course have many image configurations,
but a FEW or perhaps just ONE would be the official Squeak baseline.
Why? To keep track of those packages we hold to be very basic and
fundamental for the Squeak computing platform - Morphic and Sockets are
two of examples of such basic packages.

Image configurations are one of the things coming with next version of
SM.

> Avi

regards, Göran