Am 13.06.2011 11:50, schrieb BGB: > an image based system, OTOH, often means having to drag around the image > instead, which may include a bunch of "other > stuff" beyond just the raw text of the program, and may couple the program > and the particular development environment > used to create it. > > this coupling may be somewhat undesirable, and it is preferable to have the > source as files, so then one can "rebuild > from source" whenever this is needed. > > also, another risk is of the development image becoming "polluted" as a > result of prior actions or code, which may > risk compromising a project. Just some quick comments from a long-time Smalltalker (25 years): Of course rebuilding from source is desirable at certain points in time. For example, in the project I'm currently working on, every production build is created from a clean image into which the application's source code is loaded. This is a single-click process, just like building a traditional program from source files (except that we use VAST, where the source code is held in an ENVY repository for version and configuration control instead of plain files). However, in the development process we rarely rebuild images from scratch. It's not that we depend on image artefacts created long ago, but we prefer to keep our personal selection of tools and debugging aids. Using ENVY, it's very simple to sync our actual application source with the newest version while keeping all the tools intact. I normally rebuild my development image only when we switch to a completely new base software version, or when I've accidentally damaged it to a point where self-repair is not possible anymore (extremely rare, I've done that maybe 3-4 times during the project's lifetime of about 12 years). So, the risk associated with image-based development is mostly a theoretical one. In practice, it can be controlled just as well as with file-based development, and you get all the advantages of the image on top :-)
Cheers, Hans-Martin _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
