I really liked the web image of the early days and would like to see Hudson build something similar for us. First, the servers required for loading various packages are not always alive. Having Hudson grabbing things would: (1) monitor the servers' health for us (if builds succeed, they are ok); (2) prevent all of our have to individually load things, reducing the load on the servers and probably helping to ensure correct selection of versions in the images that are built.
With Hudson making lean, full dev and Seaside images (maybe others), each of us could choose between pre-built or home-grown images. Bill ________________________________________ From: pharo-project-boun...@lists.gforge.inria.fr [pharo-project-boun...@lists.gforge.inria.fr] On Behalf Of Johan Brichau [jo...@inceptive.be] Sent: Friday, January 07, 2011 5:17 AM To: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] About preloaded packages Hi Mariano, I'm not (really) concerned with image size. As a user of Pharo, I would expect that a Pharo dev image includes plenty of development tools and an easy way of loading external libraries (such as XML, Seaside, Glorp,....). With the advent of metacello, we now have an easy loading mechanism for external libraries such that, to me, it's strange to see those libraries being deployed in a dev image of Pharo. Even a development image should be a base to start from. But I would like to see a lot of development tools pre-loaded. Pharo is already doing a good job at that, btw, unlike Visualworks where the syntax highlighter and many other useful development packages are add-ons. Explaining that syntax highlighting is an external library to load is something new students always were amazed about when I exposed them to Smalltalk... > 1) If you want to do business, XML is REALLY important. You like it or not (I > promise I hate XML). APIs, legacy systems, other systems, etc... Then again, database functionality is probably even more crucial than XML for any business app. My point is: if you need an XML library: you can load it. oh, and, not all business requires XML (lucky me ;-) > 2) We like it or not, the packages that are included in the dev images are > the most known, supported, maintained and tested. So... Glorp and Seaside too? I'm overstating.... but there are so many good and useful packages out there that is seems strange to include some and others not. > 3) XMLSupport has been asked in the mailing list several times Well, it's not because people ask that it's a good thing. This also applies to my own mail, btw :-)) (it's just my opinion) > Once we have that, and once that searching and installing Metacello projects > is really easy, I would start removing some packages from the dev image. I see your point, but XML is really easily installable already. But hey, I'm just expressing my opinion here and sorry that I did not react to any previous email (it's a bit too much for me). cheers, Johan
