Earlier quoted context omitted.
No I'm not misunderstanding Smalltalk, that Smalltalk now has a git plugin to be able to expose itself in that manner is exactly the kind of jumping through hoops I was referring to, it's taken many years for that to become stable and most of us still don't use it, we use Monticello. And both of those are for sharing code, not for developing, we don't work on those st files, we export them. Don't tell me what I'm thi…
Smalltalk's image file(s) contain only the compiled code, not the original source code, which is on the changes and source files. You could decompile the image and get most of the source but not in its original, complete form. If your image crashes it gets reconstructed from those two files. It would be great if you Smalltalk fans would explain its source handling in these terms above, instead of promoting "image bas…
The .changes and .sources text files are maintained in-the-background by the IDE and kept in-sync with the image file.