On 07 Jan 2011, at 11:17, Johan Brichau wrote:
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...
Advanced users, such as most people on this list, will construct their own images based on either Core or Dev, I guess. So the main target is people starting out or other checking out pharo. Loading big packages such as Seaside or Glorp takes some time and is not always easy. So there is definitively value in having things preloaded. A lot of work goes into building Dev and it constitutes a really useful baseline of tested code which is very important to how other perceive Pharo. Maybe there could be more than one Dev version ? Sven