Er, well, file based tools don't work well for Smalltalk code because our fileout format isn't meant to be edited by humans. It doesn't have to be this way. Look at GNU Smalltalk. Files work fine there because there's support for them...

On Apr 7, 2011, at 11:53 AM, Colin Putney <colin at wiresong.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Frank Shearar
> <frank.shearar at angband.za.org> wrote:
> 
>> I'm all for new stuff, but wouldn't it have been more logical to back Max
>> Leske's FSGit work, so we could use other people's efforts? It just seems a
>> no-brainer to me to write Monticello<->git interworkings and get GitHub For
>> Free(tm).
>> 
>> It seems a perennial problem in our community that we have to reinvent the
>> wheel instead of making our tools interoperate with what's already out
>> there.
> 
> I agree with your premises, but not the conclusion. It's true, Max's
> work is great. Yes, we do spend a lot of energy writing our own tools
> rather than reusing what's out there.
> 
> The thing is, I don't think putting Smalltalk code on Github would
> actually be useful. Github is deeply oriented to versioning files.
> Sure, it's possible to map Smalltalk code into files, but there's
> always an impedance mismatch there, and file-oriented tools tend not
> to be good for working with Smalltalk code. If all you want is a
> remote server that you can push to and pull from, ok, that would
> probably work. But Github, the web app, is probably less useful. We'll
> see what SmalltalkHub is like, but I have much higher hopes for that
> than something based on git.
> 
> Colin
>