"Norton, Chris" <chrisn at Kronos.com> is claimed by the authorities to have written:

> [ snip Colin's interesting discussion of splitting PWS from Squeak ]
> 
> You raise a bunch of good points, Colin.  But one thing that concerns me,
> even more than *who* maintains a package, is that there is no *proof* that a
> package will work, once you get it back into your image.

An excellent point, and in fact one of the issues that makes it so much
simpler to go with a monolithic image - if it isn't there, it doesn't
get tested even minimally. We have to find a way to get beyond this if
a chunked out system is to work.

As a minimal start I'd suggest that the info on SM should include two
(hopefully) simple details - the _earliest_ release it has been tested
under and the _latest_. Either can be updated whenever it can be shown
to be appropriate. This should at least provide some confidence when
loading into one of the systems between those two numbers. We ought to
be able to make the package lister/loader do the version number testing
automagically, surely. Maybe the listing for 'obsolete' packages should
be in some ugly colour to drive the point home.

It really does emphasize yet again that people providing packages will
need to do some extra work (I call it 'engineering' :-) ) to provide
some tests and to keep things up to date. Or, of course, find assistants
to help from the wider community.

I think this represents a good opportunity for squeakers with limited time (or
experience) to both contribute and learn, by signing up to do a test
load and run of a package each time a new base image is released. It's
important to have somebody _not_ intimately familiar try this since we
rarely see anything other than what we expect. At ParcPlace we used to
call this MATing season (for Minimal Acceptance Testing) and the screams
of terror as vm weenies had to try to install database drivers or use
those wierd application drawing tools were truly heart-rending. But not
as much as those from the database dweebs trying to compile a userprims
VM :-)

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: MW: Multiply Work