>> Bottom line -- if you want to find the diffs between two old versions
>> in the ancestry, you'll need them both.  For you to assert "for sure
>> not their ancestors" is wrong -- you CAN'T be sure.  No one knows what
>> might be needed in the future.
>
> We only store trunk versions in trunk, not the non-trunk ancestors of merged versions. Seems reasonable to me.

I always considered something merged into ancestry tree, then it's
part of trunk.  It sounds like what you're saying is that diffing with
previous versions existing within the trunk repository is good enough.
 However, that still means that diffing from the Ancestry list could
result in a debugger.

>> You know what was restrictive about the version names before?  It was
>> that they were dumb Strings being treated as a multi-field object,
>> from 10 different places in the code, all similar but slightly
>> different, and none commented.  It caused paralysis because changes
>> could not be made safely.  It's why it took weeks for me to dissect
>> and do the surgery necessary to reify that crap.
>
> Actually the MC code base is very careful to not assign any meaning to a version name. Only the UI would try to parse it to present multiple versions in a useful way to the user. A version name *is* just a string, nothing more. Everything meaningful in MC had its own class, but version names were just that, dumb labels, intentionally.  Now that you have "reified that crap" people tend to misuse it for all sorts of things.

To say, the UI would "try to parse" in a context of being "useful", in
itself gives away that there are desired behaviors here based on
structure in a version-name.  Other parsing had found its way into our
systems, scattered about, to accomodate our SCM processes long before
I reified it.  I don't know how willy-nilly-naming would ever be
helpful for anything, but this is OT.

>>>>> But as soon as you use MC it needs the ancestry anyway.
>>>>
>>>> Not all of it.  We're up to version 600+ of Morphic, when was the last
>>>> time version 1 of Morphic was needed?  But we continue to carry that
>>>> around, in and out of the system, forever.
>>>
>>> It does not need to load these old versions, but it often needs to their version names, and sometimes the UUID, and having the commit message is useful too at times.
>>
>> Dodge.  Please explain the use-case where Morphic.1 would need to be
>> consumed by a human or the system.
>
> Select Morphic in the MC browser. Open the trunk repo. Done.

I said *need* to be consumed, not consumed.  Right now, the system
consumes it needlessly.  What I have so far doesn't change that except
on a per-package basis for now.

> Actually, I couldn't try it because even in a fully updated image I get a proxy error doing just that. To make sure it's not just my image I did the same using a trunk image from the build server. Same error.
>
> (using MC-cmm.560 in both cases)

I guess it's because you had merged versions in your image.  That's
fixed that in MC.561.

>> You obviously didn't read my note to Levente in this thread which
>> explained the next-step I want to take with this.
>
> I only saw you proposing to reduce the need for materializing your proxies by ignoring older meta data. Which has nothing to do with the actual issues, cf above.

Ignoring Morphic.1 seems like a safe thing to do.  By setting the
history-size preference to 999999 one could easily regain access to
Morphic.1.

And activating it via purge (vs. load) is an approach that matches up
against the use-cases very well.

>> Look, I'm glad you at least agree it's a noble _goal_.  So please give
>> us a solution, won't you?  Please share your wildest imagination about
>> how it would be possible to achieve this goal without needing to be
>> connected to a repository?
>
> I don't have a solution for that, but then I also don't see the ancestry data in the image as a big problem. We could talk about inefficiencies with the squeaksource server, but that would be a different topic.

Not a big problem, but a problem.  And a "noble" goal.   :)

> That's a good idea, to avoid running into the problem by accident. Or perhaps a preference, then you wouldn't even need a menu entry. Also useful would be a menu item (or do-it) that would restore the full meta data without going through the proxy machinery (which also could get triggered when you turn off the preference).

I chose a separate menu option in the interests of simplicity.