[squeak-dev] Shout (was: Re: 'color print' option no longer works)
Colin Putney
cputney at wiresong.ca
Sun Aug 16 03:34:23 UTC 2009
On 15-Aug-09, at 12:18 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:
> The problem appears to be that Eliot has been using Shout for
> formatting / displaying colorized Smalltalk code. Which makes good
> sense since it avoids code duplication and gives us more options on
> customizing the result.
>
> But it does lead to the same question that I raised earlier: Should
> we include Shout by default? It is small, it gives us syntax
> highlighting, prettty printing and other advantages. I would be
> propose to trade services for it to keep the core image small and to
> the point, but that's just my opinion.
>
> Comments welcome.
I have a few thoughts.
One, lets not conflate these two issues. Including Shout is unrelated
to removing Services; either could be done without the other. Let the
two proposals stand or fall based on their merits.
Two, removing Services sounds like a good plan. For services to be
really worthwhile, lots of other stuff would have to be rewritten to
use them. That hasn't happened, and it looks like it never will.
Services should be easy to make into a loadable package, so if any
other packages out there happen to use it, they can keep doing so.
Three, I'm a little ambivalent about Shout. Syntax coloring is cool,
but it seems to sink its tentacles fairly deeply into Morphic.
Understandable, given that it must respond to every keystroke. I'm in
the middle of reworking the Shout support in OmniBrower, to break the
dependency it introduces between the Smalltalk domain model and
Morphic. These aren't really show-stoppers, but they make me think
that it would be better to keep Shout as a separate package, with
really clear boundaries. Maybe someone who knows Shout better could
convince me otherwise, or come up with a way to have Shout in the
kernel image that would keep it separate from the default toolset,
available to alternate toolsets such as OmniBrowser, and easily
unloadable.
Finally, we ought to have some sort of policy or philosophy for
deciding what is included in the base image. Are we still trying to
create a minimal image that can be bootstrapped up to a more complete
image? Are "extras" eligible for inclusion if they have broad enough
appeal?
Colin
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|