Partitioning the image (was Re: Shrinking sucks!)
Lex Spoon
lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sun Feb 13 16:16:53 UTC 2005
Doug Way <dway at mailcan.com> wrote:
> Is there a situation where you'd have the global list of PI instances
> in a more minimal image, but not have SqueakMap installed? Could be,
> but that might be uncommon. I was thinking that the Minimal image
> would still have the PI instances, which means PackageInfo would need
> to be part of the Kernel, but I don't know if that's necessary. As
> long as it can add code to itself. (That is when we take a serious
> look at Spoon. :) )
It violates the privacy principle. It is fine that SM must be loaded,
because it's part of the basic code-management infrastructure of Squeak.
However, surely people should be able to make a package without posting
it immediately to SqueakMap. In such a case, there is no SMPackage
entry, but you'd still like to have author, comment, and homepage url.
I call this the privacy principle for real. Personal images should not
need to make round trips to a global server in order to do basic
operations like creating a package.
Is it possible to whip up a SMPackage entry that is not attached to any
actual SqueakMap? My impression has been that this doesn't make sense.
If this one principle were to change--and a SqueakMap became simply a
list of packages that can be copied between multiple SqueakMap's
including a local per-image map--then I'd sing a different tune here.
Notice that the universes system *does* support packages which are not
associated with any particular server. (And as a cost of this property,
a single universe cannot sensibly hold a catalog of *every* publically
shared package.) The way this discussion is going, I believe Universes
can be modified to deal in whatever PackageInfo we end up with. A
UPackage could then be a PackageInfo plus a UVersion.
The one thing that would need to be done, would be for PackageInfo to
have a list of dependencies. A set of string names is fine. Ideally,
it should also have "provides" and "conflicts", even though the current
algorithm in the univeres browser doesn't deal with these yet.
-Lex
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