Going for the Full Monti (Re: How to improve Squeak)

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Mon Jul 12 06:26:49 UTC 2004


On Jul 11, 2004, at 10:08 PM, Doug Way wrote:

> I guess we should brainstorm a bit on how this might work before 
> making a decision, of course.

More than that - I would hope we would try it out in parallel with the 
update stream for a few sets of updates to see how well it works before 
we even talk about making a decision.

>   Erm, would the "image" be a giant single package in Monticello?  Or 
> at least the part of the basic image which is not already split into 
> other packages... which would still be a pretty giant package at this 
> point.

No, I think we'd want to carve it up much more than that - maybe one 
package per major set of system categories (Kernel, Collections, 
Morphic, etc).  Though some of those (Morphic esp) are pretty huge in 
themselves, and should probably be split more.

When Andreas and I tried a very early proto-attempt at this (see the 
Squeak project on SqueakSource), we used one package per category, 
which was easy, but probably excessive.

One thing to point out is that there's no requirement that the packages 
have clean dependency chains between them - Monticello actually deals 
reasonably well with spaghetti code arbitrarily carved into different 
packages.  I had a feeling that would be a necessary use case in this 
world ;).

> And then how would the update stream fit into this, if at all.  It 
> would appear that the core committers would not need an update stream, 
> at least.  Maybe there would still be an update stream for the 
> "public" alpha image somehow.

I think the vision Göran was articulating was to get rid of the update 
stream altogether.  That's not something we could do all at once, of 
course, but I think it's a reasonable goal.

Avi



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