Modularity again

Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM
Wed Aug 9 21:22:01 UTC 2006


Colin Putney wrote:
>So far, though, nobody has used those tools to do any untangling. 
>Note also that Dean's proposed path, which I've quoted above, 
>doesn't involve any rewriting or refactoring, only unloading.

Please don't make too much of my comments.  It was largely a
response to a comment from Andreas:

>What I called a pointless exercise is 
>to target an artifact with certain packages removed (a "mini" image) as 
>the goal instead of a process. The mini-images that we have are such 
>elaborate and -in terms of modularity- absolutely, completely, and 
>utterly pointless exercises since not a single person in the world 
>understands what needs to be done to get an image into such a "mini 
>state" again.

I only meant to suggest that there may be a repeatable way to produce
a "mini" image with a certain set of functionality.

I agree that this doesn't untangle anything.

Since modularity and reuse are somewhat at odds with each other (much
like time and frequency, MIPS and memory usage, etc.) this raises the
question of what is a "good" balance between modularity and reuse?

Also, what constitutes a "minimal" image?  I think there are almost
as many answers to this as there are users of Squeak.

Do most people really care about modularity, or do they just want
a way to get a small artifact (i.e. image) for distribution?

I will stop before I get too far down another rat-hole.

        -Dean
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20060809/a4780714/attachment.htm


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list