On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 06:27:59PM +0100, Hilaire wrote:
Entropies always comes with interacting 'living' system.
Good point. I just tried loading GitFileTree into a Pharo 5 image that I've been using for a while. The image had, to use your term, collected enough entropy such that the loading failed and the VM hung.
GNU Smalltalk took an original approach: it ships a minimal image you don't modify and you install code on top of it. So really you never save your image, entropies remains constant over time. This approach is not really possible with Pharo.
Nowadays we are encouraging building images from configs from the CLI or programmatically, no? Some have mentioned starting with a freshly baked image every day. In my case, I took a fresh image, into which GitFileTree loaded cleanly, then loaded my working stuff through their configs that I've been maintaining. Pierce