On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Stéphane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr>wrote:
On Jan 7, 2011, at 5:10 PM, Miguel Cobá wrote:
I concur with Mariano and wonder why Stéphane wants a smaller dev image?
Because we have to fix bug of packages that we do not know, control, want to fix... Because been agile to load and having a good infrastructure for validating packages is way more important than preloading XML. If we spend our time on the infrastructure (metacello publication, configuration certification, hudson reporting) then the complete ecosystem will get better and you should be able to automate several builds and pharo-dev whatever.
I'm concerned that our resources are limited and they are a lot of ugly ugly things in the system Now not everybody should work on them but then the insfrastructure is more important.
I agree that we should care about what packages are included in Pharo. But actually for newbies it's still complicated to discover and learn how to load a ConfigurationOfXXX. So one goal of Pharo 1.3 should be to have a GUI to load additional tools / libs / frameworks in one click (I've seen there's one included, that's a good step forward, but some work is needed). For Pharo 1.2 I'd rather leave XML in because today I expect that every programming environment used in enterprise supports XML out of the box. It would also like a PharoBloat image built by Hudson with all ConfigurationOfXXX which are supposed to work on all operating systems. Laurent.
Right now there are two images, the core and the dev. As the core is promoted for deploying, the size of the dev isn't an issue. At least in terms of deploying.
Now the dev image is currently targeted to new users, so I think that it should have everything that is know to work in Pharo loaded, so that the users doesn't have to cope with the installation issue of new packages. This also means that tutorials and documentation can be straightforward. Just showing what they want to teach, and not explaining what to do to install some random package. So this will help document and promote Pharo.
Now maybe the name dev is misleading. It says development although the image is for everyone that is not deploying some application. On the other side, there isn't officially a dev image, only PharoCore and Pharo. So maybe we need to create a official PharoDev image targeted to the developers but this is also very subjective as what packages made a development environment, it is upon the developer. So maybe this make no sense at all.
So the options are:
1. Refer to Pharo dev as Pharo, the official name and officially make it targeted to new users and so include everything under the sun (like the fun images of Edgar, that can show off the capabilities of Pharo) 2. Create a PharoDev, with a list of common dev packages, also officially supported
TL;DR; Pharo is for new users and should include everything preloaded. PharoCore is for deploying and the developer install just what he wants. Maybe a PharoDev is needed targeted directly to developers.
Cheers -- Miguel Cobá http://twitter.com/MiguelCobaMtz http://miguel.leugim.com.mx