Anyone know of any research being done in the arena of smalltalk backward 
compatibility?  I was thinking about this today, and it strikes me that 
perhaps since smalltalk has a live image we have some options "the cult of 
the dead" don't have regarding backward compatibility [1].

For example, maybe with every package we could include (or have generated if 
possible) all the things we obsoleted and what the correct call is now.  So 
when the updated package is loaded into an image, in the simple case client 
code is simply updated with the new API and in the more complex case a 
pop-up could appear showing the now obsolete calls and suggestions of the 
usage now.

We can do optimizations with the packaging system like; if you do an install 
then the backward compatibility info is dropped since it isn't needed.  But 
the package manager is asked to "upgrade" then it had to do a scan since the 
obsolete package was previously in the image.

[1] Well, the would have the options, but not in the clean reflective way 
smalltalk does.  It would have to be a nasty file scanning hack type thing 
or perhaps something with Eclipse (which would basically be a nasty file 
scanning hack :)

>From: stephane ducasse <stephane.ducasse at free.fr>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: The Weekly Juan #9: "An update on Morphic 3.0"
>Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 21:34:50 +0100
>
>
>On 7 mars 07, at 02:08, Juan Vuletich wrote:
>
>>Hi Stéphane,
>>
>>I guess you're right. There must be really a lot of interesting  code out 
>>there. However, one of the things that keeps me busy is  actually removing 
>>stuff from my image, so there's less I need to  know. I'm currently 
>>slightly below 5Mb! And I don't care too much  for back compatibility.
>
>please do NOT be backwards compatible. Be good, nice, small, elegant  will 
>be enough!
>
>Stef
>
>A friend of mine (a cool one) was making the comparison between mac  and 
>pc.
>On mac regularly you get driver, plug (like RS232) that get  obsolete... 
>and on PC you get all the backwards
>compatibility layer to carry with you. So may be this is why windows  is 
>often not that stable (my point is not to open
>a debate PC vs Mac but to make us all think in terms of the tradeoff.)

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