Daniel Vainsencher wrote:

>Doug Way <dway at riskmetrics.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>It sounds like we're agreed that PackageInfo should be something of a 
>>standard for now.  We could plan on adding PackageInfo to the update 
>>stream soon.  (Possibly along with SqueakMap and SAR.  Well, depending 
>>on whether those get added to the update stream or kept on some sort of 
>>Basic Image package... more on that later.)
>>    
>>
>I think PackageInfo should be treated the same way we intended for SM -
>maintained, released and provided by it's maintainer, as an SM package,
>with the update stream containing occaisonal "reload package X" updates.
>This really really should be "reload version n of package X", so we know
>what we're inviting into the users image, but we'll have that after
>SM1.1 comes.
>  
>
That sounds like the way to go.  I was concerned about how external 
packages would be kept up to date if we added a single "load package X" 
into the update stream, but adding "reload package X" updates at the 
appropriate times would handle that reasonably.

Also what I'm getting at is that I do think a "load SqueakMap" update 
does need to be added to the update stream.  Keeping SM out of the 
current image is making things a bit too painful right now, IMHO.  (At 
least it's annoying for me to have to always use one image for loading 
things with SM, and then going to a separate "clean" image without SM to 
test potential updates for harvesting.)

I think it's probably a bit too early to force people to manually load a 
"Upgrade to Basic" package to get SM and other Basic tools, anyway.  
Assuming SM is a well-behaved package (i.e. which does not overwrite any 
code in the image), it will be trivial to remove it from the image again 
when we get closer to the Minimal image.

>For these packages to be official does mean that they'd be subject to
>some policy we've yet to invent, and that their contents should not
>change very surprisingly, since they're part of an official release.
>
Right.

>IOW, Avi, PackageInfo will have to slim back down unless I get shouted
>down with cries that a VW3 package exporter is really generally
>essential ;-) 
>
That's probably not crucial, but yeah.

- Doug Way