> I've been busy shrinking a 3.6(wx) image today. What a mess.

probably many of us have faced the same. Few weeks ago I have
discussed another possible approach with Pavel Krivanek.

In my opinion we should focus not on cutting parts of today's huge and
messy image, but on building a compact, well shaped image from zero
up.

What do you thik about starting with image that has just a sort-of
emergency evaluator (it could even be only connected to stdin/stdout),
some base classes (ProtoObject, Object and stuff like that) and can
load and run *.st files from local directory?

Then all we need can be packaged and filed in when really needed
(sockets, MVC/Morphic/..., etc.)

In my opinion this can lead to smallest and cleanest image possible
which will change only ocassionaly (I believe there is nothing much to
be improved on Object)

Another issue concerning image cleanup is (and it was also discussed
here many times already) to find a way how to unload any package
completely. Even linux distributions do NOT clean up correctly in all
cases. I know it can be almost impossible to remove methods added with
the package to classes outside it (like adding IsWhatever to Object).
Many people seems to think that until we don't solve this, we'll never
have 100% pure system. Undefining messages is not a problem until two
packages will modify the same concurrently.

But when we would have separate small packages, reconstructing the
image without one package is trivial (we just start again with empty
one and load all the other packages in), so we do not need to be able
to remove package cleanly, therefore the time wasted creating unload
scripts can be wasted with something more funny.

just my 2 cents (did you count it? if all these 2 cents would be real,
we could buy a spaceship already :) )

-- 
.:jbk:.
Jan B. Krejci