On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 01:02:59AM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> Do you think it would be feasible to exclusively manage an image from  
> SVN sources?
> 
> The reason I'm asking is related to the "image" problem I reported  
> earlier, the Linux folks demand the image to be to bootstrapped from  
> sources + media files. Which IMHO would be a major re-engineering  
> effort. E.g.,

Well, it's not a great fit with Squeak, but Smalltalk/X has always worked
this way (and probably Gnu Smalltalk too), so clearly it's possible.

But frankly I suspect that a good old fashioned update stream with
human-readable change sets applied to some known base system would
address most of the perceived problem. If the base system consists
of sources plus "media" (a well-recognized image of known heritage),
then everything applied subsequently is easily traced, and can be
reapplied by anyone interested in doing so.

I would also note that those annoying Linux folks might just have a
point here. If we had followed these guidelines consistently over the
last few years, we would not have ended up with the mess of lost
author initials, untraceable changes, and unidentified licensing that
we are faced with today.

I think that Edgar has talked about trying to rebuild Squeak 3.9/10
from changes on top of a solid 3.8 image. I think he has the right
idea: fully traceable sources, all in plain text, and easily rebuilt
from a known base system. The 3.8 image itself was built from update
streams all the way back to an image of known heritage and license
status. Really, this is not a bad state of affairs.

Dave