Earlier today, I posted a build script - the one I'm now using for BottomFeeder runtimes. The cool thing is, that script is easily adapted to any runtime. You just use code like this to load the parcels you need:

parcelList do: [:each | Parcel loadParcelFrom: 'parcelToLoadhere.pcl].

And then drop down to the packaging code that I covered in the post. The cool part is, you really don't need to use RuntimePackager anymore. With a simple Smalltalk script and an accompanying shell/batch file, you can:

• Install your own unhandled exception handler
• Specify the startup code with a subsystem class with a simple API
• Build up from a base runtime, rather than stripping down from a development image

All of that is pretty cool - it has never, ever been easy to work with RuntimePackager. With BottomFeeder, I had to rebuild the list of classes to keep and remove each time there was a new release of VW, and - as I added/refactored code, that list would often need tweaking - as the tool often makes mistakes on its own. With the build up mechanism I wrote about earlier, that just doesn't happen.

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