Managing non-Smalltalk artefacts in Envy

Most Smalltalk projects, just like any other, consist of much, much more than simply the source code you write. There are icons, images, sounds, ini-files, xml files and many more. Some of these are text based, some are binary.

A modern project needs a mix of tools to edit all these file types. And, of course, if you (and you do) have to keep track of versions and configurations of your deliverables, you need to store them and keep track of changes in them.

Envy is a really powerful and cool tool for managing Smalltak code (in fact, it has proven to also be the same for Java in IBM’s VisualAge for Java), but it also is a bit different from many other version control and configuration management systems, in that it is not file based, but uses a far finer-grained model of classes and methods.

So it is very good in keeping versions of Smalltalk (or Java, or theoratically any class bases language’s) source code, but it falls a bit short in managing other artefacts.

In my talk at the VA Smalltak Forum 2010 (“Get your project back in shape – how a few techniques can change your (project’s) life“) I’ve discussed two options for using the envy library manager to store non-smalltalk artefacts.

One is the possibility to