On Wednesday, August 20, 2003, at 01:42  PM, Martin Wirblat wrote:

> If we release something it must be tested almost by definition,
> otherwise it is no release, it is more of a joke. If something is in
> Full which nobody uses, it should be removed from Full.
>
> But 'releasing' Full and testing only Basic somewhat means effectively
> getting rid of Full. I have the impression that some people's
> subconscious is driving their opinions to this thread in this
> direction :-)

Perhaps. It's hard to say what my subconscious is up to; I'm generally 
unaware of it.

However, I am quite consciously arguing that removed packages should be 
just that: packages. No longer part of the base platform. Free to grow 
and evolve, or stagnate and wither on their own, according to the 
inclinations of their communities of users and developers.

> I guess this is not what the majority of Squeak users wants.

Well, I can't speak for the majority of Squeak users.

What I want is for Squeak to be flexible enough to be easily useful for 
a variety of purposes. This means that I look at the 'Full' image as a 
multimedia distribution - an image preloaded with all the multimedia 
packages that came out of Squeak Central's time at Disney, and Squeak's 
historical use as a platform for pedagogical research.

I'm all for testing. Let's make sure that everything we release has the 
highest level of quality we can reasonably achieve. As far as I know 
there are only two ways to test effectively: run SUnit tests, and use 
the software for everyday business. Both are best done by a variety of 
people on a variety of platforms and configurations.

It's my opinion that putting removed packages in the update stream 
doesn't make any difference as to how much of either type of testing is 
done. Getting the code into an image, whether through the update stream 
or through SqueakMap, is an insignificant proportion of the total 
effort involved.

That's all I've got to say, so I won't post on this topic anymore.

Colin