Tim Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Since the sources and executable can be in a single place for all 400
> users (and by the way, congratulations on getting that sort of project
> going) what does it matter whether the .sources file is 10Mb or 15?
> 
> Now if you're talking about a full condenseSources to empty the
> changelog, that would make sense BUT thus far we've only done that for
> major releases. One big disadvantage is the loss of history, which
> might be important to a lot of developer types.
> 
> Nothing prevents you from doing it for your own purposes though. Since
> I imagine you'll be customising the image a fair bit anyway, just
> imagine it as a small branch on the family tree.

That's true, history is nice for Squeak developers.

However, many Squeak users aren't developing Squeak itself, and don't
care about the history.  It would be nice if the minor stable releases
started having small changes files.  It would roughly double the amount
of images you can have in the same amount of disk space, and it would
similarly decrease the amount of time it takes to ftp images around.

Anyway, it already sucks that history is lost from before 3.0, unless
you want to load a 2.9 image.  We really need a better history mechanism
at some point, anyway....

Perhaps a good compromise for now, would be to have a semi-condensed
sources file for minor releases, which still includes all the history. 
This should be fairly simple to implement and would seem to be an
improvement for both kinds of users.  So SqueakV3.sources could be fully
condensed, and SqueakV3.6.sources could be semi-condensed.


-Lex