Re: Envy or Store or what?

Cees de Groot wrote:
> Ned Konz <ned@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
>  >> What's the best approach for similar functionality for Squeak?
>  >
>  >Probably DVS (available from SqueakMap) with an external CVS or other=20
>  >source code management program, and perhaps CVST as an interface with=20
>  >the CVS server.
>  >
> With all respect to the guys behind DVS and CVST: I think it's a dead 
> end. I
> have been using CVS ever since it was a bunch of shellscripts around RCS 
> (look
> that up in the history of computing ;-)), and while it's sort of OK, 
> compared
> to "the real thing" like StORE it has some very serious shortcomings which
> makes it unsuitable as the basis for a nice, friendly versioning system for
> a Smalltalk environment. The most serious thing missing is lack of metadata
> versioning, working around is probably just as hard as building something
> new on top of a decent versioning system.
>
> Smalltalk, and Squeak in particular, is about doing The Right Thing. CVS 
> is,
> IMNSHO, a crutch that is absolutely necessary at the moment to have 
> something,
> but definitely not The Right Thing.
>
> Reinventing wheels is maybe not the right thing either. Cincom pulled off a
> great job with StORE, and it's a great piece of code, but I don't think 
> it's
> something we should reproduce. Maybe talking to a WebDAV server?

This (to me) is a huge tragedy. I'm a bit more guarded about Store than 
you (as a hardcore user); I'd say Store is in the process of becoming 
cool. We've had to add a number of tools around it to really create a 
good process on top of it. But I will say this, once done, it sure does 
beat the heck out of fileouts and such. The real tragedy to me though is 
the "reinvent it all in every version of Smalltalk known to mankind" 
philosophy the Smalltalk world has. A well known guru was known to ask 
"why are you all still programming in Smalltalk?" (paraphrased). To 
which I'd answer "because we just love rehashing the same stuff over and 
over and over and over again." Bottom line, why not just target the 
Squeak stuff at a PostgreSQL database. How I would love to interchange 
modules with Squeak in VW. I'm using the compression one right now. But 
someone had to go through effort to jump it from one environment to the 
other. And now they drift apart.

> Freshmeat has a lot of stuff: http://freshmeat.net/browse/52/?topic_id=52 -
> I'm going to browse and see whether there is something cool between all the
> chaff...
>
>
> (so, here I go again. Talking about what should be done while knowing 
> that I
> don't have the time to do it or even help out. My apologies, I hope you can
> live with that bad habit of mine...)

Ditto.

--
Travis Griggs
Key Technology
One Man's Pink Plane is Another Man's Blue Plane