[squeak-dev] Did we really nailed files?

Chris Muller asqueaker at gmail.com
Fri Apr 8 21:35:48 UTC 2011


> I'd rather not have to check in three times to change behavior in three different packages that are a part of a core system or application. I'd prefer to make a single commit with all of the changes across all of the packs I've touched as an atomic thing, so that you can see the full context of what I've changed in the diff. Making separate commits forces the integrater to go digging for correlations between commits in order to understand the changed, which totally sucks when there's money going down the tubes by the minute because production is down and I'm staring down a merge conflict while trying to ship a hotfix.

When you make a change to several of your suite of packages, we can
make a new MCConfiguration which associates them together.

But, I do agree, it would be nice to version Configurations with
ancestry, diff between configurations, browse history, etc.  We just
need some incremental improvements to MCConfigurations..

> I don't really see what the package metaphor buys me when I'm developing, though I do (obviously) see the value in being able to load and unload hunks of functionality.

Yep, that's it.  So we have a reasonably-grained "hunks of
functionality" we can use to configure custom images for specific
purposes.

And this is why I think we haven't needed to wreak early-bound
namespace solutions onto ourselves; complete with "imports", name
resolution rules, blah blah blech.  First, because prefixes have
proved to be a well-balanced solution for the Smalltalk environment;
we configure images that don't need all code in the universe never to
conflict.  Second, prefixes impart certain "expectations" about, for
example, what we can expect from a WAUser vs. EtoysUser, which puts
them in closer direct relevance to the portion of the domain they
address, which makes them easier to understand too.

Third, we're using a late-bound tool development environment, we can
rename things on the fly if the rare-case of a collision were to
occur.

 - Chris



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list