Against package removal

Markus Gaelli gaelli at emergent.de
Thu May 8 17:30:26 UTC 2003


Anthony Hannan wrote:
>
> The latest updates include package removals.  What does this buy me
> except a smaller image file?  Who cares how big the image file is
> especially once its downloaded.  Hard drives are big and virtual memory
> only loads what is used.  So the only benefit is quicker initial
> download, which is just a one-time event.  After that, you can download
> incremental updates.
>
(...)
>   With a full image, I find all dependent code and make
> changes accordingly.  This allows me to make wholesale changes,
> confidently.  I wouldn't be able to build a robust closure compiler if 
> I
> didn't have Etoys, MessageTally, ProcessBrowser, ImageSegments, etc.
> loaded because I wouldn't know to update them to work correctly with 
> the
> new closure compiler.

Hi list,

I second this very strongly.
I am also all for a tiny image,
but _the_ image, which is _the_ image,
we are talking about, when we talk about
updates, for me still meant the "full" one.
>
> So I recommend:
> 1. Keep a single full image.
> 2. Add module framwork to the image (a la ClassBoxes).  Modules not
> only facilitate better structured code, but allows different behavior 
> to
> co-exist in the same image without clobbering each other.  The module
> framework can be added without displacing the current behavior
> structure, allowing both structures to coexist and collaborate.  Then
> classes and methods can be moved to modules as desired.
> 3. Work on distributing the image (using technology found in Magma,
> rST, etc).  This will allow us to share the same image and build a
> collaborative world (a la Croquet).
>
Possible short term solution:
Let us just acknowledge, that we want both,
a minimal and a full image.

I think, it is already possible to build a smaller image and
a big one automatically, so we just should have the possibility
to download both of them. This wouldn't be a fork, as the big
and the small one would share exactly the same code-base.

When we have that, (Guides?) suffixing the mail-prefixes
like [ENH] or [UPDATE] with something like [FULL] or [MINIMAL]
could help to end this discussion.

As for me [FULL] means default, I could omit that
one, but maybe thats a kind of borderline here.

What do you think?

Cheers,

Markus
> Cheers,
> Anthony
>



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