Hi Andreas,

Well...considering that the distinction between development time and
runtime is a deliberately fuzzy concept in Smalltalk (or at least not a
concept enforced by the environment), I think Modules share some
similarities with DLLs.  Take the example where someone is running
Squeak as their operating system...forcing them to run different images
(because you haven't solved the modularity issues) is the equivalent of
having to dual boot your PC.  I don't like solutions that rely on having
multiple images available.

I wish we had DLL-hell in Squeak, but we aren't even that evolved.  What
we have now is Spaghetti-hell, which is even worse.  But, I think we can
come up with a solution that is much better than the DLL solution.

- Stephen

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> [mailto:squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On 
> Behalf Of Andreas Raab
> Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 8:47 PM
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: RE: An uncomfortable question
> 
> 
> Hi Dean,
> 
> Let me drop in a note here. Modules are no DLLs - they are 
> not shared runtime components. E.g., DLL-hell as we know it 
> from Windows is due to the fact that no developer can foresee 
> what DLLs any customer may have installed on his or her 
> system at *runtime*. This is very different from detecting 
> and handling problems at *development* time.
> 
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas