.mcv => .sar?

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Tue Jul 29 08:39:19 UTC 2003


Just a half-formed late night thought:

We'd like Monticello to support a number of different formats - for
Smalltalk source code, this could include .st, .mc, .sif, .pst,
Rosetta, and maybe others.  For other kinds of packages (and I don't see
any reason why there couldn't be other kinds), there would be an entirely
different set of possible formats.

However, the contents of each of those formats maps to what Monticello
calls a "Snapshot" - the collection of definitions being versioned,
without any particular ancestry or packaging metadata attached to them.
But what we generally want to be passing around are Versions, which
contain a Snapshot plus all the necessary extra bits of info.

We'd fuzzily been thinking that each format would have some semi-natural
way of including this metadata - annotations for SIF, maybe a preamble
comment for .st, and so on.  But this is pretty adhoc and doesn't feel
quite right.

What about taking a page from Ned's book and making the format be a ZIP
file?  You could have special paths monticello/package,
monticello/version_info which contained the metadata, and
monticello/snapshot which explained (as a SAR-like install script,
perhaps) how to recreate the Snapshot from whatever other members (like
"source.sif", say) were in the ZIP.

They could in fact be SAR files, whose install script checked for the
presence of Monticello.  If it was there, they wouldn't directly install
anything but instead would pop up the Version window from which you can
load, merge, etc.  If there was no Monticello they would load themselves
into the image as best they could.

How does this sit with people?

Avi



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