On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 01:39  AM, Avi Bryant wrote:

> 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?

I like it. This pretty much lets us have our cake and eat it too. As a 
bonus, the compression ought to keep these files reasonably small.

A couple of thoughts:

One, we ought to have a way of putting multiple packages in one file. 
Combined with Monticello's ability to figure out dependencies, this 
gives us a good way to distribute applications, which may consist of 
several packages.

Also, I agree with Daniel - no scripts. Let's not go wrapping our nice 
declarative format with an imperative index.

Colin