On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 15:36:57 +0100, Volker Nitsch  
<volker.nitsch at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2) What is bad about forking? I read a lot about packaging and debian
> here. Well, there are the BSD's too. Lots of forks, but sharing a lot
> of code.
>
Lots of code duplication. Lots of double work. People writing the third  
version of 'ls' - how useful is that? Fragmentation where cooperation  
would be more productive.

> 2a) Is smalltalk ready for a single base-image + packages?

Why is that necessary? The idea is *not* to have a single base image.  
Instead, the idea is to have tailored base images for various groups. And  
yes, this smells suspiciously like J2ME, J2SE, J2EE, and whatnot. So be  
it. Maybe it's just a good idea :)

> 2c) if 2b) is practical, how about a "race" to the next image? Some
> groups of people make their images, and after some time one is choosen
> as the official next one. The others take it, port their favorite
> stuff, improve, and hope to make be official the next time.
>
Personally, I'd prefer if each group would be able to build, maintain,  
release their own 'official' image. But at the same time, sharing code  
where necessary.

A nice example is that I noted that Goran and Avi where doing the same  
thing for building HTML pages in HV and Seaside. I'm not sure whether this  
actually happened, but the logical step is to factor these common bits out  
 from both packages, merge them, and co-maintain the common ground. Now,  
this is a trivial example, the long-term idea is to do this on a grand  
scale probably starting from either scratch (writing an image from zero)  
or from almost scratch (images the size of Craig's Spoon work).

The end result is probably more important from a sociological point of  
view than a technical point of view. At the moment, everyone has to  
communicate with everyone, because (almost) everything sits in the image.  
This is not possible, so artificial bottlenecks are created. This creates,  
errr.., bottlenecks ;). When everything is hacked up, people need to talk  
only to the people who maintain their dependencies - say Etoys people  
should talk to Morphic people, but for day to day operations they should  
not be force to have an interest in what the MVC guys are doing, or the  
Seaside people, or the Alice people.