[ANN]A plan for 3.8/4.0... (insert drumroll here)

goran.krampe at bluefish.se goran.krampe at bluefish.se
Fri Apr 2 08:37:19 UTC 2004


Hi Michael and all!

Michael van der Gulik <squeakml at gulik.co.nz> wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> I think I've missed a thread somewhere.

No, don't think so. Or perhaps missed a LOT of threads - depending on
how far back you want to go! :)

> goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:
> > Just as an icing on the cake Craig Latta is also getting anxious to get
> > a part of the action and expressed his intent to try to get the Squat
> > work ready for production in time with 4.0 which could mean that a 4.0k
> > (kernel) might also be released at the same time!
> 
> Is it the intention that Squat is the new kernel for Squeak? I was under 
> the impression that Craig's stuff was more experimental distributed 
> systems stuff, with fancy things like an absolutely minimalist kernal, 
> remote access and class loading thingys.
> 
> Mikevdg.

No, there has been a long term intention all along to fold the work done
in Squat back into mainline Squeak. In short - we have been taking "baby
steps" in vanilla Squeak to break out stuff into packages - a top down
approach. Craig have started in the "other end" trying to produce a
really small minimal image, and the tools needed to get there. He has
been careful to record his doings (I think) so that it can be reapplied
to a more current Squeak, like 3.8.

The idea is now to somehow "meet" halfway so that in the future, Squeak
is built from a tiny kernel and then loading packages on top to get back
to approximately where we are today.

Note - if you download 3.7beta you are getting what we call Squeak
"Basic". "Basic" is actually a Squeak "Minimal" (not currently
downloadable separately) + a few packages installed. This is evident if
you look in the package loader - there are already a few packages
installed.

So the frontline (Squeak "Minimal") of the community is the "Basic"
image minus the packages you see in the Package Loader. But since they
are packages they are quite easily "thrown out".

Note: Just recently we have begun issueing "SM commands" into the update
stream to install packages into the Basic image, instead of pumping the
actual code into the image.

regards, Göran



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