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[goran.krampe at bluefish.se]

Hi!

Avi Bryant <avi.bryant at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 13:55:48 +0100, goran.krampe at bluefish.se
> <goran.krampe at bluefish.se> wrote:
> 
> > I am still unsure if Lex is interested in merging Universes with SM or
> > as I describe above we simply make SM able to map them and get to them.
> > If Lex wants to continue with Universes totally separate from SM
> > (meaning no merging) then I will simply make sure SM handles them as I
> > always want SM to handle stuff in the Squeak community - it would then
> > seem very stupid to add a similar mechanism to SM because then we would
> > have two such competing mechanisms.
> 
> Well, exactly: this is an area where it's unlikely for two competing
> systems to both survive for long.  People don't want to register the
> same package in two different places, with two different dependency
> systems, etc.

I agree fully.

>  One of three things is going to have to happen:
> 
> 1. We do a lot of work to merge the two concepts into a new package
> repository system, that combines the best of both SM and Universes. 
> Frankly, I think this would be a bad idea; the two were designed with
> different goals and different visions, and I think I've seen enough of

Not *that* different.

> squeak-dev dynamics to know that we would spend more time arguing
> about how to do this merge than it was worth.

Well, perhaps. :) It mainly depends on the willingness of me and Lex
IMHO.
I just looked over the latest Universes source briefly and note that
there is a LOT of overlap, IMHO a merge would do both systems some good
- but again, this depends on what Lex wants.

> 2. We do no work at all, and let the two of them fight it out
> evolutionarily: people will register their packages with one or the
> other (or, for a time anyway, maybe even both), and eventually one
> will fade away into disuse.  But this would be a shame, because as I
> mentioned in (1), they really have quite different goals - they happen
> to overlap in the area of managing a list of Squeak packages, but
> that's the *only* purpose of Universes, and is (in terms of vision)
> really just an incidental part of SqueakMap.  Which suggests, to me,
> 3. We split the responsibility: SqueakMap is the "map of the Squeak
> world", which lists all the various resources like universes,
> repositories, people, websites, images, whatever.  Universes are where
> you go to actually register a package.  Each of them does what they do
> best, and there's a nice, well defined relationship between them.

Well, I have a variant 4 in mind that is a bit different. :)

> Now, it's maybe it's a bad idea for me to use the names of the
> existing systems when describing (3) - clearly, SqueakMap in that
> scenario would look very different from how it does now (even if it
> were fairly similar internally), and Universes would have to change as
> well.  Really, what I'm proposing is that we have *a* central, public
> system that holds metadata about resources like repositories (both
> development and release) and user accounts  (ideally shared by all the
> various Squeak systems), and *a* system of distributed repositories in
> which package versions get registered.  SqueakMap and Universes seem,
> respectively, like great starting points for these, but if (for
> example) you really don't like the Universes dependency model and want
> to propose that this fictional package repository system use another
> one instead, that would certainly fit within the scope of what I'm
> suggesting.

Well, I like choice - as long as it dosn't harm us. :) So I want people
to be able to use Universes easily, but I also want to explore my
dependency model etc, I don't want to give that up.

So my proposal is something like this (and of course, it all depends on
Lex):
	- Make SM aware of other things like images, universes, repositories
etc.
	- Still keep SM as the main catalog of packages and releases of them.
	- Make the Universes code use SM for the packages/releases. Looking at
UPackage for example it is very much overlapping SMPackage. There may of
course be issues with this approach but I would like to discuss it at
least.

This would mean that there is one place to register a package or a
release thereof. But then, you would be able to find the universes in
SM, and be able to add a package etc to them instead of having to
reregister the same data.

Something like that. But now I would like to know more about Lex
feelings on the subject before discussing it further.

> Avi

regards, Göran