Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

Below is MHO from painful real life experience ;-)

> I expect to use only the Full image.
> What am I supposed to do about updates?
> - Can I be confident that updates to the Base image won't break the
>   packages in the Full image?

No. And actually that is not much of a change as updates in the alpha 
(anybody remember why it is called *alpha*) update stream did break 
stuff before. When somebody complained, then it was fixed.


> - Can I be confident that updates to the Base image will have been
>   *tested* with all the packages in the Full image, and that updates
>   will check for the presence of packages they are incompatible with,
>   so that I will be warned about and allowed to cancel an update that
>   might break the Full image?

No, no, and not really doable in practice. Even MS with their gazillions 
of testers fails to achieve this.

> - Will packages that are not part of the Base image also have some
>   kind of update stream, or will they only be replaced in toto on
>   SqueakMap?

That is very much up in the air right now, part of the reason for the 
many messages that have been flying around.

> - Is there _anything_ I can do to keep a Full Squeak current, or do
>   I just jump from official release to official release?
> 
> To be perfectly honest, I have hitherto *preferred* "wait for the next
> stable release" to "keep quite current", but I have been feeling a bit
> guilty about that, because it's one of the main reasons why I haven't
> done any bug fix testing.  The fact that a bug fix seems to work in my
> image does NOT imply that it works in a fully patched image, so I've
> felt that any bug testing I did would have been pointless.

So in practice not much is going to change for you then? ;-)
Seriously, I've also preferred to not update while I'm in the middle of 
some development and the squeakland plugin image is also getting new 
releases twice a year at the most.
As I said, the update stream is called alpha for a reason.

All very good and valid points raised in your questions!

Michael