Module discussion

Modules discussion

Before the SqueakBOF a bunch of Squeakers met for about 1 hour to
discuss the current situation regarding "modules". It is a complex
question that covers many different areas that are often mixed up. There
were approximately 15-20 (?) Squeakers present including Michael Rueger
(representing SqC), Doug Way, Ned Konz, Avi Bryant, me (Göran Hultgren),
Stephen Pair, Roel Wuyts and many others.
At SqC there is a lot of interest and Dan said he'll pen a response from 
SqC later today regarding these and other related topics.

Here are the preliminary "decisions" that came out of that meeting:

1. We decided to abandon the Modules system currently begun in 3.3alpha
and freeze 3.3alpha, because it will be very hard to "undo" it. We will
salvage all the updates in 3.3a that are not related to Modules.
According to Michael, Scott Wallace has already put quite some effort 
into this and a first 3.4 release could be out very soon.


2. We will create 3.4alpha from the current 3.2 and push the salvaged
updates into that.

3. We will salvage image refactorings that have been made in 3.3alpha.

4. We move forward with the "lightweight route" that SM and DVS gives us
today. This means that SM goes into the 3.2 update stream (and of course
it will also be in 3.4alpha) and there is a green light to start
breaking out stuff from the 3.4alpha image into packages on SqueakMap.
This process should of course be done cooperatively and coordinated.
Thus, piece by piece the image will shrink and the maintenance
responsibility for Squeak will become more and more distributed.

5. The green light for the "lightweight route" means we will also start
thinking about adding support for package releases and dependencies
between those in SM, but this really needs to be discussed in more
detail before being adopted.
For the time being there will be no packaging mechanism in the standard 
image. People are free to use DVS or other tools to organize their work 
and load it into the standard image through e.g. SqueakMap.

6. The image will remain a centrally managed base using the update
stream as before, but given SM and tools like DVS it will start to
shrink and individual maintainers can start managing their own packages
outside of the image.


Göran, Doug, Ned, Michael