[squeak-dev] Preferences ignoreStyleIfOnlyBold

Frank Shearar frank.shearar at gmail.com
Fri Jan 3 18:15:19 UTC 2014


On 3 January 2014 17:57, Colin Putney <colin at wiresong.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 12:03 PM, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> OK, so that's you & I in agreement. I think Colin's happy for it to
>> go. Any ol' timers out there with warnings of doom, before I rip this
>> out?
>
>
> No, I certainly wouldn't miss it.
>
> I will say this, however. I don't know if it goes all the way back to ST-80,
> but I do remember that styled code was considered important in the early
> days of Squeak. I seem to remember some tweaks to Monticello when it first
> came out that would allow it to store styled code the same way it's stored
> in the changes file. IIRC we even supported hyperlinks in code, although I
> don't remember actually seeing one in the wild.
>
> Therefore, we ought to decide if this is a change in policy—i.e., we're
> going to support plain-text source code only—or if we're just rejiggering
> preferences for better modularity. If it's a policy change, we have a free
> hand simplify the codebase accordingly, take styling commands out of code
> editors and so on. It doesn't have to be done right away, but let's consider
> that on the agenda for 4.6.
>
> On the other hand, if we consider styled source code important, we should
> figure out how to change the preferences to play nicely with Shout for those
> who use it, while still retaining the ability to manually style code and
> persist those styles along with the content of the code.
>
> Personally, I'd vote for plain-text only code. I can see the value of styled
> code, but that's not the way the world went, and it's no longer worth the
> complexity or friction when dealing with the world outside of the image.

My vote is also for plain-text only code. But my vote is _also_ for
not screwing things up for Chris while he works on getting 4.5 out the
door.

David has an Inbox that will, when pushed to trunk, break the final
strand between Collections and System. The snapping of that rubber
band would satisfy me for 4.5's purposes.

This preference causes a Collections -> Tools dependency which,
transitively, means it still depends on System. The Tools <-> System
entanglement is too large for me to untangle in the 4.5 release
timeframe, so I vote for voting on plan text vs styled text in 4.6.

(I am A-OK with styling in class comments though, even though I've not
actually used any styling. (And class comments could do with an edit
pane or something, so the UI can tell me how to use these fancy links
in the first place.))

frank

> Colin


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