On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 11:51:20PM -0700, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
>     finally the Spur Squeak trunk image is updateable. 

Yay!

> The issue
> is of course that we have this tricky package situation to manage where, to
> keep the two systems in sync, modifications to Collections, Compiler,
> Kernel and System need to be committed from V3 and auto-edited to Spur. I
> think that's too clumsy to be practicable.

When I look at the Spur related changes to these four large packages, it seems
to me that we might be able to reduce the scope of the problem by moving the
parts that require changes into separate packages or sub-packages. The portions
of these packages that need to change are not insignificant, but if they were
contained within well defined package boundaries, they might become simpler
to manage.

To illustrate: The changes in the Collections package are almost entirely
related to class Character, whose instances are immediate in the Spur format.
It might make very good sense if the methods directly related to immediateness
of a character were localized in a package where they can be maintained
independently of all the other Collections classes and methods.

Looking at it from another angle, the Kernel package is arguably too large, and
if I want to make changes to Kernel-Chronology (as I have recently been doing
with UTCDateAndTime <http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6197> just as an example),
then I have problems if I want to coordinate that external package with Squeak
trunk.  If I also want to coordinate my little project with all the updates
required for both Kernel and Kernel.spur, the situation becomes impossible.

I apologize in advance because I have not really thought this through in
detail, but it seems to me that a bit of pragmatic reorganization of our
package structure might make the Spur transition a lot easier to manage.

I note that in the past we have put energy into reorganizing our package
structures in the interest of making the image more modular. That is important,
but managing the transition to Spur is even more important. If improving the
package structure could make this easier, then we should make it a priority.

>  Perhaps allowing the two
> systems to fork and doing a manual merge will be acceptable, but it'll be
> work to keep them in sync.

I agree. I also think that this kind of maintenance work is not enjoyable,
and is not likely to be kept up on an ongoing basis. So we need to think
of ways for the path forward to be A) enjoyable or B) not too much work or
C) all of the above :-)

Dave