[Cuis-dev] [RFC] Sunsetting v3 image format, merging Character and UnicodeCodePoint, New Directory Structure for Cuis

[Gerald Klix]

Hi Juan,

I do not see any possible harm in retiring this old image format.
I never used it for Haver,.

I don't know of any OSes were only the old VM version is available,
I don't know of any significant advantages of the V3 image format and
I can't conceive any other (important) point in favor of this format.

There are however some small space savings possible,
which are eliminated by compression support (and maybe deduplication)
at the file system level:

bear at speedy ~/g/C/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev (master)> ll -h *.image
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bear bear 17M Dec 30 13:39 Cuis6.3-6156-32.image*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bear bear 16M Dec 30 13:39 Cuis6.3-6156-v3.image*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bear bear 20M Dec 30 13:39 Cuis6.3-6156.image*
bear at speedy ~/g/C/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev (master)> du -h *image
6.8M    Cuis6.3-6156-32.image
6.8M    Cuis6.3-6156-v3.image
7.3M    Cuis6.3-6156.image


So please go ahead!


HTH and best Regards,

Gerald



On 1/3/24 10:25 PM, Juan Vuletich via Cuis-dev wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> The subject says it all.
>
> I want to simplify some code in the image by unifying Character and 
> UnicodeCodePoint. But this can not be done for the old v3 image 
> format, as it can't handle immediate Characters and is therefore 
> limited to 256 distict Characters. Additionally, OpenSmalltalk has 
> shifted to Spur only quite some time ago, as Squeak and Pharo have 
> also done.
>
> So, I'm planning on removing the v3 image from the 
> https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev repo soon. If 
> anybody has some special need for v3 images, let's discuss them.
>
> On an unrelated topic, the new directory structure for 
> https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis6-2 will also be used for 
> https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev. If your specific 
> workflow depends on the current directory structure, you may need to 
> adapt it. Please take a look at 6.2, and see how it could affect you.
>
> These changes allow either for simplification of code, or to improve 
> the experience, especially for newcomers and casual users. I believe 
> they are worth the possible nuisances.
>
> Thanks,
>