Stephane Ducasse-3 wrote > You see. You pushed this idea and at then end we will have to handle the > mess. > I do not see why we cannot simply support *.
I'm surprised by this resistance. The *Xyz was always an ugly hack, part of Squeak's overloading the same mechanism for both system categorization and packaging, and exposing and limiting protocols as "just dumb strings", all of which IMHO makes the system much less understandable (no real "private" tagging, extension methods can't show up in proper protocol, etc). We're not in a feature freeze, so what is the problem with tackling part of this mess now? Sure, maybe the UI support can be improved, but let's focus on some concrete suggestions. Denis and I just happened to be talking about this larger issue the other day. Here are a few snippets I dug up during that conversations of some of my many posts about this over the years… > we have overloaded system categories to package code for SCM. System > categories should be tags (preferably multiple allowed) > which offer a logical view of the system. Packages, the POV we show now, > are orthogonal and much less useful for users. (edited) and another: > I feel more and more that the standard "Package" pane is only useful > for... packaging, and when one takes off the dependency management hat and > puts the user hat on (i.e. most of the time), what you really want there > is a logical view of the system. So I see three use cases: - Logical view of the system - I guess this was the original intention of Categories, but has been hijacked by Monticello - By project - which, as you just showed, we have now, yay! - By package - the least useful, but primary (up til now), view (edited) and regarding Nautilus' tree package pane (when it first arrived): I noticed that right now, separate packages within the same project are not collapsed. E.g. if I have MyProject-Core and MyProject-Platform, they will be siblings in the tree, instead of both under MyProject. It seems like it would be more useful to have - MyProject - Core - Platform in the tree > it seems that the tree is primarily about chunking information into > manageable pieces. A primary difficulty here is that packages are often divided for reasons that have nothing to do with the domain model, e.g. the ubiquitous MyPackage-Platform, which is an artifact of Metacello that is not all that relevant to a user wanting to understand the system. >From the naive user perspective, if I'm exploring from the top level of the system, I want to see things like: - CodeImport - Collections - Compiler >From this perspective, the 14 entries for Collections, multiplied by a few dozen top-level categories make the list unwieldy and only marginally less daunting than the flattened list we used to have (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two ) ----- Cheers, Sean -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Developers-f1294837.html
