Apple sounds like the kind of company that would successfully build a smalltalk device, yet they go the opposite way of locking down their devices hard.
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.
So don't.
Build a reproducible distribution image from a base image + fileIn source code.
https://cuis-smalltalk.github.io/TheCuisBook/Daily-Workflow....
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...
I haven't messed around with smalltalk since squeak, around the dabble-db days. I was uncomfortable with the montachello (I think?) diff system. Maybe I'll have to give it another spin the next time I get a good long break.
I have experienced working with people who seemed far more interested in tinkering with the Smalltalk IDE than work on the mundane tasks needed to complete the project. They preferred tinkering to work ;-)