[squeak-dev] Monticello's Package Loading Strategy (Bug)

Colin Putney colin at wiresong.com
Wed Jun 28 23:46:35 UTC 2017


On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 2:35 PM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>
wrote:

can you imagine how to fit "unknown" definitions into the design? That is,
> definitions that are not "understood" by this version of MC, but would
> still be preserved somehow, and stored with a new version.
>

Good idea.

One thing we could do is make serialization into a more first-class
concept, orthogonal to repositories. Then each serialization scheme would
be responsible for creating "unknown" definitions if it reads something it
doesn't recognize. Loading etc would ignore them, but the serializer would
handle them correctly when reserializing. Some serializations might even be
able to embed "foreign" unknown definitions - a binary serializer like Fuel
or S&M could handle an MCUnknownChunkDefinition just fine, for example. But
if not, we'd just drop the unknown definition just as we do now.

That would make the optimization you talked about before more legit—we can
just copy bytes iff we know we're using the same serialization.

Another nice side effect of that would be to make repositories more
flexible. We could use Content-Type headers, file extensions etc to figure
out the right serialization scheme, instead of coupling file format to
transport/storage mechanisms like we do now.

Does that make sense?

Colin
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