[Cuis] [ANN] Cuis-SecureSocket

[Phil (list)]

On May 25, 2012, at 5:40 PM, David Graham wrote:

>> We could also load packages from GitHub. The problem I see is that it would make installing packages much easier than commiting code... This might mean that less people would contribute. I think this part needs more thought and discussion. What do all you think?
>> 

Some extra steps on the commit side wouldn't deter me from contributing (says a guy who hasn't yet committed anything to Cuis :-)  But when I think about pretty much any bit of code I've written that involved version control, committing is always more expensive and I can automate my way around that.  Seems a worthwhile tradeoff when you consider the likely install to commit ratio.

> This is closely related to something that I'm genuinely curious about.  I don't consider myself experienced enough to fully understand all the issues surrounding smalltalk DVCS, but it seems like everyone is moving towards file-based DVCSs (i.e. git) for smalltalk code.  Is the future direction to move away from smalltalk tools and integrate file based tools?  Again, it may be my inexperience, but it seems like a strange trend for such a powerful programming environment.

I would hope so, but I'm in the minority of Smalltalk users.  In theory, most things being handled in-image seems to make a lot of sense.  In reality, the Smalltalk community has limited resources so reinventing the wheel re: DVCS etc. doesn't appear to be the best use of those resources and seems to result in limited/brittle/incomplete re-implementations of solutions already provided elsewhere.  One of the things I've really enjoyed about the decisions re: Cuis 4.0 and packages is that by simply accepting and adopting how the 'rest of the world' (at least the *nix world) deals with text files, we get multiple problems solved and capabilities gained essentially for free.

For example, it sounds like these changes were made to facilitate using git.  But I'm still (mostly) on svn for version control and now find myself using it as well as many of my favorite *nix text processing tools for free with Cuis as a result of this change.  (Yeah, I know I could have done so before by simply translating to and fro as needed but it caused enough friction where I often wouldn't... now I find myself using them without even thinking about it.)

Thanks,
Phil