On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 11:41 PM, Ralph Johnson <johnson at cs.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
>> + I'd really love to see a single RefactoringBrowser package that
>> could be loaded on all the platforms using Grease. I have no idea if
>> there's any chance of buy-in from the vendors on that one; maybe it
>> would need a new class name prefix so it could be loaded in
>> parallel...
>
> The various packages are all derived from the same one originally.  They
> have different GUis, and often have to interface to the system differently
> because different versions of Smalltalk have different APIs for classes and
> methods.  Does Grease provide an API for classes and methods?  Does it have
> a GUI?  Other than that, they will differ only because people have added
> features to one version and not to the other.  So, which version did you
> want to use?

I know, but they've essentially forked over the years. They may have
been one package once but they certainly aren't now and because of
that they continue to diverge. It may be that Grease isn't needed at
all - I don't know because I haven't dug into it. If all the current
functionality can be done with only ANSI APIs, then great. And no,
obviously the UI will continue to be different between platforms. Just
like Seaside, it's fine to have platform-specific subpackages but the
core should be loadable (ie. it would be nice if it was) on all
platforms.

Julian