MC in basic (was: Re: A roadmap for 3.9)

Avi Bryant avi.bryant at gmail.com
Mon Dec 13 11:32:37 UTC 2004


On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 00:34:33 -0800, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:

> Finally we're on par with 3.5 again - which coincidentally was the version
> of Squeak where people complained bitterly about all the excess baggage that
> SqC had put into Squeak. So then we put VMMaker, Games, Celeste, Balloon3D,
> Wonderland, Scamper into packages. Only to replace them with m17n,
> SqueakMap, SUnit, Tests, (and soon) Monticello in basic.

The important distinction here, however, is that SqueakMap, SUnit and
Monticello (and maybe Tests as well?) are already well packaged, and
can be unloaded easily - so even if they're in the "basic" image (and
personally I won't argue either way), there's still a conceptual
"basic--" image that can be trivially arrived at by unloading all of
them.  What's most interesting to me is not what the images that
actually get put up for download look like, but what percentage of the
code in those images is packaged such that it can be easily removed. 
I think we have indeed made progress (albeit slowly) on this since
3.5.

That said, there are still practical issues around how we manage the
update stream in the face of packages living within the base.  At the
least, if we're including something like SUnit in the base, we may
want to start updating it in a smart conditional way that won't screw
up your image if you've chosen to unload it.  Since SUnit and the
other packages are maintained outside of the harvesting process, with
only occasional syncing changesets like the one Marcus recently
posted, this shouldn't be too much of a hardship (indeed, we should
probably write an automatic tool based on MC for producing such
changesets).

Avi



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