[Cuis-dev] Not saving the image?

[Gerald Klix]

On 8/1/21 2:05 AM, Juan Vuletich via Cuis-dev wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
-- snip --
>>
>> Cheers,
>> -KenD
> 
> Thanks Ken. Your comments are stop on.
> 
> I just want to add that a comment. We have found that for many newcomers 
> to Smalltalk (for example, from Python), the idea of the Smalltalk 
> image, and saving it is very alien. 
This strikes me kind of of funny.
Coming form Smalltalk/V I used Python as a surrogate for more
than 17 years and I always missed the image-based approach.
About 10 years ago I went to great length to simulate
Smalltalk's image and browsing abilities by storing
Python code in an OODB, ZODB in fact, and writing
a lot of wxPython-code. I invested round
300h of my spare time in that project. It was never
satisfied with the result.

> Still we want them to be comfortable 
> with Smalltalk. On top of that, the idea that "all code is always in the 
> repo" helps some team workflows. At least, it worked well for me for 
> several team projects, and for maintaining Cuis itself. Hence the 
> suggested workflow.
Let me stress the following:

I love that image-based workflow.
OTH Cuis has this rolling release approach,
that enables Juan to react quickly when errors occur.
In addition this approach gives the users access
to the latest development results which is just great.

Several times after using the same image for week or so,
I found out the hard way that I had "painted myself into
a corner". On a new-image my changes and packages did not load.
Sometimes this happened with the very same image version
I started, because I made a typo in the categorization of
some extension methods. Finding those bugs is tedious.
Sometimes I messed things up completely:
https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/archives/cuis-dev/2021-July/003450.html

I now try to reinstall all my changes (basically Haver
and the project I am working on) every time Juan
publishes core updates. T am convinced that
this routine saved me a lot of tedious debugging.


Just my 0.01€,

Gerald