Keith Hodges wrote:

disclaimer - i am just a user dabbling in Squeak a bit. Feel free to 
ignore me.

*snip*

> Edgar has delivered image after image, but does that help anyone in the
> long run really. It  doesn't help me. I have production code and I don't
> have time to spend a month moving it form one image to another manually,
> without any tools to help, broken MC, broken Universes etc. It doesnt
> help us move forward in the future to something like Morphic 3.0, or COG
> for which atomic loading is likely to be essential.
> Real World Example:
> 
> As an example, Gjallar was working in 3.8, there is no technical
> compelling reason to move the huge code base over to 3.10. It doesn't
> offer any must have new features. The only reason for moving is to be
> able to keep up for the sake of it. So into this situation comes
> Installer, Gjallar migrates to use Installer for its build scripts
> (July2007). Once Installer is used, the build script can be run in 3.7,
> 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, Sophie, Croquet or Etoys. 

So, basically these are the two philosophies:

Installer --> to be able to load code in many versions/forks

Images --> predefined load

Is that about correct?

Assuming yes:
To me, images appear to be a consequence of a working Installer/Packager.

For example, take VAST/VS(E) (even VW):
You develop your code in some image. Then you create a package for your 
code. The code still runs in your dev image.
However, the code also runs - assuming Envy does not do a mistake 
gathering all dependencies (VAST) /you do not mess up the SLL bindings 
(VS(E) -  once loaded in a plain image of around 50k.

So, there you go: Create a package, load it in some plain image, then 
you have a (insertFeatureHere:aFeature)-Image.

Is "core" Squeak supposed to be that different? What is the vision, what 
is the main branch?
Why is there such a hassle about this topic?

(this does not even take into account interfacing to other Smalltalk 
dialects)

*snip rest*