On Tuesday 06 May 2003 06:26 am, Arie van Wingerden wrote:

> One of the best "features" of Smalltalk and even more
> Squeak, is the general availability of source code.

No one wants to get rid of the source code.

> When "decreasing the image size" really means creating several
> "unclothed" versions + sets of "clothes" to make them wear, I think
> it's a bad idea.
>
> IMHO I think that Squeak should remain a stable platform which is
> generally useable to build upon for anyone.
> BTW, why bother about image size? As far as I get it so far one can
> unload lots of stuff if needed for some reason?

That's the problem. Squeak doesn't unload things very well.

Because we want to encourage people to use Squeak in many different 
kinds of systems -- all the way from little embedded systems to full 
blown media environments -- we decided to follow the strategy of 
distributing a minimal stable system with a couple of sets of 
packages loaded on top of it. This way you can choose the "off the 
shelf" image that best suits your needs. Other packages can be loaded 
as needed.

Right now, there's a single official image that you download. It has 
lots of packages loaded in it. If you don't need those packages you 
are faced with a lengthy process of tracking down and removing the 
extra stuff.

We're working toward having three official images available for 
download. The safest way we can think of to do this is to do it in an 
additive way: make sure we can make the smallest one work, and then 
define two different sets of packages to load into this small image 
to make the bigger ones.

This gives us three images to test, of course, but lets us have 
off-the-shelf solutions that are better matched to various needs.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE