change management in Smalltalk

[Eric Dean Tribble <tribble>]

Hugh and I, then Ravi and I evolved the following proposal for
managing smalltalk changes and the generation of new images.

~xanadu/st80/releases has a directory for each image realease.  Each
release directory is named for the date of the release.  It contains
all the changes files that created that image from its previous image,
and a subdirectory called image that contains the '.im', '.cha', and
.log' files.  The directory 'current' is actually a link to the most
recent release directory.  The special directory 'next' contains all
the changes files to be put into the next release.  

I have created the appropriate directories for our current release.

To make a next release, rename the 'next' directory to the current
date, change the 'current' symbolic link to point at the newly renamed
directory.  create a new 'next directory.  create the new image
subDirectory.  Finally, create the new image by starting from the
previous release and filing in all the change files.  We must avoid
using a modified image or we'll start accumulating debris and
magically initialized variables.

We should make a shell script to do step us towards the next release
(create all the directories, etc.

The 'file out changes' operation on the background menu will be
changed (by whom, you ask?) to suggest a file name of the appropriate
form ('st80:release:next:rnp-aa.st', for example).  Ravi suggested
using alphabetic sequence numbers so that they sort in sequence order.

We also need to make the 'file out changes' operation checkpint to the
log so that it's easy to find.  

Please file out your changes before filing in other files that are to
be included in the next release (you might just file out every
night...).  This way we don't get changes multiply included (making
for more conflicts checking).

We should merge at least after every Tuesday meeting.  We should also
merge whenever someone desperately wants someone else's massive
changes.

What d'ya think?  I hope some of this can be done by other than Hugh,
Ravi, me, or anyone else on the path to Autofact.  Thanks.

dean