[squeak-dev] The Trunk: Morphic-cmm.756.mcz

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Mon Feb 2 04:26:01 UTC 2015


On Sun, Feb 01, 2015 at 05:57:40PM -0800, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > ParagraphEditor is in ST-80, so not part of this package.  Speaking of
> > that, is a corresponding change to ParagraphEditor necessary?  Is
> > ParagraphEditor intended to be purged at some point?
> >
> 
> Not necessarily.  People use it as a way of reducing footprint.  Whether we
> can afford to keep it going long term is debatable but so far people like
> David Lewis have done a good job of keeping it working.  So by all means
> fix compare to clipboard therein.
> 

+1

There are several reasons why this matters.

1) If you care about modularity, then you should care about packages that
are unloadable and reloadable. MVC (the ST-80 package) is (or was? hopefully
this is still true) fully reloadable. ParagraphEditor is a key part of the
MVC environment, so if you want it to go away, you should just unload MVC.
Morphic needs to be made reloadable also, but that has not happened yet.

2) If you care about making Morphic modular, either in the sense that it might
become unloadable and reloadable, or in the sense that it might be replaced by
something better (Morphic 3, or maybe something entirely different), then it
is important to know where the boundaries of the Morphic package and behaviors
lie. That is critical to the ToolBuilder, UIManager, and Project architecture.
For better or for worse, we have only two working implementations of that
architecture right now, so I think that it is important to keep both Morphic
and MVC in good working order if we are to have any chance of knowing and
maintaining the boundaries.

3) If you were interested in light weight images that might run on very
large numbers of processors, then it would be convenient to have a small
but usable UI environment available for those images. In that case, you
might want to unload Morphic and everything that goes with it. You might
then be happy to have a working MVC at hand, and of course you would want
ParagraphEditor to work also.

Dave



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