It was a bit of a combination. We tried using pre built images but managing them got out of hand pretty quickly and there was no easy way to diff images so whoever did it had to be careful.

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.

> … code merge hell at the method level … envy and it fixed everything.

Puzzled. ENVY/Developer is still Smalltalk and code merge still method level?

Perhaps what was shared within teams and between teams changed?

Yeah, there were a lot of side channels for sharing code that made merging things more difficult than they could have been. Poor discipline when devs were in a mad rush.

Seems to me that "sharing changes amongst your team members" is much more about process than it is about tools; and the process (whatever it is) must be followed by everyone every-time.

(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.

Envy enforced discipline in a way, which helped a lot. Sure, the devs could have had that discipline with filed out classes but because envy made sharing code easier, they inherited that process as well.