> … filing that into other developers images as they went…
Seems to me that after "building a new system image" all their developers worked with that same fresh system image (built from known archived sources).
(Perhaps I'm wrong about that.)
Then we settled on pre built images with just the across team shared code. But that got difficult too, as some teams didn't want to upgrade as quickly as others on the shared code base, so we were maintaining several versions of that.
The teams themselves had regular image consolidations saved, plus file outs and some PVCS for those, but it got increasingly harder to make a consistent merged image no matter what and devs were spinning their wheels in a kind of code merge hell at the method level that is unique to smalltalk.
Then we got envy and it fixed everything.
ParcPlace did eventually come up with a different structure for packaging and sharing code but it was too late and too simplistic to be useful.
Puzzled. ENVY/Developer is still Smalltalk and code merge still method level?
Perhaps what was shared within teams and between teams changed?
(With the benefit of hindsight) seems to me that many teams made their mistakes with vanilla Smalltalk and avoided those same mistakes when they moved to ENVY/Developer.