I'm not beholden to the "proxy" implementation, just the
design-properties that it provides:  1) achieves the goal of purging /
recovering the memory consumed by the ancestry objects while, 2) doing
so safely and transparently, with never any intention of mutilating or
dis-membering the ancestry -- because the stub is as good as the
original when called upon.

Those are the _design_ properties anyway, if there is some other
implementation which could achieve these properties, I would support
it.

As for the time-consuming reification, I like Tim's idea of a cancel
button on the Progress bar (note that Eliot DID simply use
Command+dot) rather than a confirmation prompt because of the headless
server situation -- a delay would be painful enough to notice, but not
enough to bring the server down like a confirmation prompt sitting
there...

I'll at least get it removed from the menu for now.

On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 12:47 PM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> The problem I have with proxies *as a user* is that when you’re doing something where they help, they're great and when you do something where they surprise you and trigger some time-consuming thing they’re terrible. Finding a middle ground may be difficult.
>
> In a case where something triggers a load of packages - which is almost always going to be pretty time-consuming, even when you have gigabit internet and the package server is in a really good mood - it would be nice to have some opportunity to stop it. In fact I think it would be nice to have a reasonably clean ‘stop this right now!’ button on the progress morph for almost any kind of long-running activity.
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Strange OpCodes: SLTMDL: Shift Left, Test Mask and Dim the Lights
>
>