The Pharo hackers write Pharo to enable them to make Pharo better. They are a shining manifestation of eating their own dog food.
Outcomes of this effort are powerful version control and package management. I don’t know, but it seems quite clear to me that Pharo folks start with base images, load their package dependencies on top of it, then hack away on their own code. Inevitably they create a new package with a list of dependencies for others to use.
What they don’t appear to be doing is “living” in their images. Rather they create application specific instances from source code.
Emacs users tend to “live” more within it than the SmallTalk/Pharo people do.
In the end they distribute images assembled much like a Docker image is today, made from a deterministic set of sources and then snapshot.
Yeah, I'm somewhat of a Pharo hacker and the workflow is pretty similar to any other software: Start with a base image, create a package, add code to the package, use git (via Iceberg) to save diffs for a particular package off for distribution. It's analogous to hacking on an operating system image in a container: keep your code and the system separate (via the "packages" abstraction in a Pharo image, or via the filesystem in an OCI container image) and you will be fine. The "Baseline" concept is a bit opaque (and weirdly named IMO, but a lot of the Pharo community is European, and especially French, so presumably it makes more sense in that context) but is a form of dependency management that works OK, though it would be nice to have a more Linux-distro type experience for installing packages.
Outcomes of this effort are powerful version control and package management. I don’t know, but it seems quite clear to me that Pharo folks start with base images, load their package dependencies on top of it, then hack away on their own code. Inevitably they create a new package with a list of dependencies for others to use.
What they don’t appear to be doing is “living” in their images. Rather they create application specific instances from source code.
Emacs users tend to “live” more within it than the SmallTalk/Pharo people do.
In the end they distribute images assembled much like a Docker image is today, made from a deterministic set of sources and then snapshot.