On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 10:14  AM, cg at cdegroot.com wrote:

> Daniel Vainsencher <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org> said:
>
>> What you want, I think, is a 'requires'/'provides' pair. A Squeak base
>> release 'provides' some interface version, a package 'requires' some
>> interface version. I'd decouple this from the published version 
>> number,
>> because with all the mods we're going to have on the 'outside' with
>> little change on the 'inside' (just like now - two Squeak versions are
>> internally the same) they are going to deviate quickly.
>>
>> Probably you want to match on as much detail as 'requires' provides. 
>> So
>> with current 3.5 Squeak providing '3.0', a package could require '3',
>> '3.0', or even '3.0.1' (if there ever would be a 3.0.1 patch release).
>> If you call this package 'base' or 'core', you'd have
>> - Squeak 3.5alpha provides 'base-3.0'
>> - Package foo (most packages, I think), require 'base-3'.

A slight variation on this, which I think would work even better, would 
be to make "requires" refer to an update number rather than a release. 
So you'd get 'base-5968'.

Of course, the next step would be to revamp update streams to 
accommodation a package-oriented universe. Off the top of my head, I 
think that would mean update streams for individual packages, and 
streams which include Daniel's "levels of compatibility" data for each 
update.


Colin Putney
Whistler.com