Trying to respond to couple of messages instead separately:

>From Colin:
> Monticello currently supports all three of 
> these, but not at the same time. To get a) you do an export 
> to standard .st, for b1) and b2) you need to use .mcv, and you need
> to have Monticello loaded. Am I correct in understanding that this
> is the source of your frustration?

Actually my frustration wasn't about Monticello, but rather about what
seemed to have happened in the meantime with DVS and the SARInstaller. But
it seems that some of my presumptions Monticello were wrong (as I can see
from the various posts). And yes, I want all three and hopefully in a format
that just makes them "one" (to some extend ;-)

Avi wrote:
> Would this be better, in your opinion, than simply using chunk
> format directly?  Or the VW XML fileOut format, which is a little 
> more flexible? Or Rosetta, for which there is XSLT to convert to
> chunk format?

I have no idea and I really don't care as long as it is canonical. Chunks
will do, so will XML. If someone asks me those kinds of questions my common
response is: Ask Michael. Well, he said XML, so I prefer XML.

Daniel wrote:
> I didn't understand exactly what you're proposing.

Essentially an abstract interface for making changes to the system in which
any particular client can hook in. It wouldn't have to be Monticello
specific; it's the documented abstraction that counts. For example, when I
wrote the MAPI client I went to the MailSender and quickly found that
basically what I need to implement is #sendMessage:. Well, it turned out to
be not *quite* as simple but still it was encouraging to look at and have a
place to get started.

> BTW, have you looked at an mcv file using a text editor? 
> I think that it could be converted into valid .cs with a
> pretty simple regexp, by someone with no Smalltalk knowledge
> (just two samples to compare).

I have now, and yes it looks as if it is pretty canonical itself (which is
good).

Cheers,
  - Andreas