Thanks David, Casey, Edgar, Chris and Ken for the feedback so far. It
seems this is a good quick-and-dirty thing to do for 4.2 to make the
possibilities of Squeak more explicit to new users without annoying
people who just want a clean image to based their work on.

Ken Brown raised a very importan point:
> I would like to see an easy way of unloading the stuff I have temporarily loaded to
> take a look at. I would NOT like to have loaded a project, then deleted it only to
> find out that all the code that was necessary for the project, was still hanging
> around. I do not like having to rely on closing the image without saving to revert
> back to the previous state. I often find I do some messing around in a Workspace
> that I probably want to keep, but that gets blown away too when quitting without
> saving the image.

It is even a little worse than you think - if you close without saving,
the extra code will be gone from your image but will still be present in
the .changes file. If you play with it some more the next day and again
quit without saving, then it will be there twice. Or am I wrong about
the interaction between loading packages and .changes?

Unfortunately, I don't have a good suggestion. Unloading in general
would require some infrastructure that we don't have and certainly won't
have time to build for Squeak 4.2. An option would be to limit ourself
to showing off packages that do have unload scripts available. I have no
idea of how much "fun" this restriction would eliminate. By the way - I
think of it all as fun, even stuff like Seaside and Aida and drivers for
object databases; not just music and games.

In this case I imagine a typical project having a column of buttons on
the left side like "load all", "unload all", "load seaside", "load
pier", "load scriptaculous", "load seachart". Then you would have some
text windows and/or bookMorphs explaining stuff and possibly some
drawings.

Another issue is how much to depend on online operation. In the past I
have put in a lot of effort making Squeak distributions that would be
useable to people with a CD drive but not an Internet connection. The
fraction of our community in that situation has been significantly
reduced (perhaps to zero?) in the past few years. So one option would be
to have a single "Worlds of Squeak" project inside the image itself,
with a bunch of subprojects actually living in
http://ftp.squeak.org/4.2/worlds or something like that. Since the
project needs to download code to show off whatever it is trying to
demo, then having the project itself unavailable when offline won't be
too much worse.

That said, it might be a good idea to mirror those particular versions
of the packages used inside the ftp.squeak.org/4.2 directory and always
fetch from there so things don't break when squeaksource.org gets
reorganized a few years down the road or some other site goes entirely
off the air. Once that is done, having an offline "CD-ROM" mode wouldn't
be too much extra work. But as I wrote above, it might be that this is
no longer worth any extra work.

-- Jecel