[Cuis] What gets included in the image vs. external packages

[Casey ransberger]

Inline.

On May 23, 2012, at 7:40 PM, "Phil (list)" <pbpublist at gmail.com> wrote:

> Lots of great discussion happening re: several things that will make Cuis even better.  

It's been wonderful. Thanks to all present.

> However, it begs the question: what's the dividing line of what gets included in the base Cuis image vs. what should be external (possibly preloaded) packages?  

Juan is the dividing line in my view. After Juan, the rest of us. For now, at least, he's a benevolent dictator and he's good at it, because he listens, he's patient, he's passionate about what he's doing, he works hard and with enthusiasm to help with the projects we do in Cuis, and he's flexible.

Or: once you grok the design principles behind Cuis (the most important parts of which can be found on the web site,) it starts to be easy to know what goes into core and what doesn't. Does a solution provide valuable new functionality in an elegant way? Or does it simplify many other parts of the system, making the whole easier to understand and thus make use of?

If we can make a study of these (and other) questions an intrinsic part of our culture, we will need only a group of core developers who understand the ideals and ethics behind what we're doing. As our community grows, this will become increasingly important (IMHO,) as the integration workload will only grow.

> For example, I'm excited about the discussion re: mobile device support but, other than whatever minimal changes might be needed in the image to facilitate this support, I'd rather see this sort of thing as an external package(s) rather than baked into the image so that Cuis doesn't wind up having a similar set of issues as the other Squeak distros.  

Find a way to do it in one beautiful class. Then we can easily convince everyone that it should be in the core;)

> Maybe it makes sense for the 'default' version of Cuis to have many of these goodies installed, but if they were installed as packages it sure seems like it would be easier to get back to a base/core image for those who either need to go in another direction or just want a core image to play with.  I'm curious as to what the thinking is on this front...

We've talked about shipping different versions of the image; perhaps a core image and a "full" image, but since everyone here is a developer at this point, I think it's still healthy for us to build our images ourselves: we'll find more bugs that way and it's DIY punk-rock. But that's just my opinion, and counter arguments are (of course!) quite welcome.
> Thanks,
> Phil
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