On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 10:18:21PM -0800, Andreas Raab wrote:
> Matthew Fulmer wrote:
>
> This goal may be a bit of a red herring, depending on how you think about 
> it. The way in which it could make sense is if there were a package delta 
> stream so that (for example) Seaside could have a common delta stream for 
> all supported Squeak image versions. Outside of that I have my doubts about 
> the usefulness of this approach - I cannot even begin to imagine applying 
> changes (even from "harmless" streams) across the board automatically 
> without some manual review and intervention.

The application I have in mind that would benefit from an
approach like this is documentation. Having comments in the
image is a very good thing, but getting them in is more trouble
than most people are willing to invest, especially in core
packages, which sometimes need it the most.

How I would like to solve this dilemma is to make a delta stream
that only logged comment changes (both class comments and method
comments). This stream would auto-commit regularly (every day or
so) to an unofficial world-writable stream managed by the doc
team (me). The doc team would review deltas published to this
stream and either reject them or publish them to an official
stream, which most images could subscribe to.

I plan on, at least initially, using the update stream format
(lots of chunk files + updates.list) as the delta stream format.
This format allows any change to be marked by which image
versions it is compatible with. Any subsequent format should
have this property as well. (If Giovanni Corriga has his way,
delta streams will one day be atom feeds)

Delta stream publishers should definitely be careful about what
they publish, and make sure it works as advertised. If they
don't, social mechanism's will kick in and most people will just
unsubscribe. This includes image publishers, like the release
team and Damien, who can decide which streams are subscribed to
in their distributions.

-- 
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808