[Squeakfoundation]re: Network stuff

[Doug Way]

On Monday, May 5, 2003, at 07:12 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:

>> 	I also think all the packages we've mentioned so far
>> should appear optional to the user. If it seems like something
>> will "rot" because it is merely available from SqueakMap and
>> not in a release snapshot, then there's something wrong with
>> the SqueakMap system (and we should fix it).
>
> These changes are somewhat "special" in such that we're talking about
> rewriting these things rather than merely adding something. In other 
> words:
> In this particular case any evolution that goes on within Squeak 
> renders the
> changes done questionable (if not entirely unusable). Think, for 
> example,
> about the recent discussions at Squeak-Dev about using progress 
> indicator,
> #confirm: and friends - many of those are used exactly wrong in the
> networking code and in this sense, as soon as someone starts to touch 
> these
> places, the stuff that's up at SqueakMap really does "rot". BTW, the 
> issue
> of notifiers popping up in background threads was the latest reason 
> why I
> wanted this stuff fixed ;-)

I agree with Andreas' assessment of these particular changes... these 
are rewrites/improvements rather than add-ons.

We haven't yet gotten down to the point of splitting off lower-level 
packages like the Networking stuff into a separate package.  But once 
we do that (in 6 months or whenever), and given that we'd have 
SqueakMap 1.1 by then, something like the network rewrite could 
represent Network package version 2.0 versus the previous Network 
package version 1.4, for example.  So then people could choose to use 
either the 2.0 rewrite version or the earlier 1.4 version.

So in that sense I think the SqueakMap system should be able to handle 
what you're talking about, but we're not there yet.  For now, if the 
rewrite is agreeable to everyone, it should simply overwrite what's in 
the image now, IMO.

- Doug