On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, John W. Sarkela wrote:

> Exactly the point. Perhaps DVS could in the future signal a
> Notification upon redefinition. That way redefinitions could
> be easily loaded (with notifications of redefinitions that are
> typically ignored) but that allows a more careful loader policy
> to intercept the notification, preferably prior to changing the
> state of the image.

An interesting point.  The problem is that most people loading DVS
packages are doing that outside the control of DVS, ie, they're just
filing them in as changesets.  This means that any such notification has
to be embedded in the fileout, which gets a little bit ugly - the most
robust thing would be to have a doIt at the top of the fileout that
checked, for each extension method in the package, whether that method
already existed in another package and was about to be overwritten, and
raised a notification if so.

Perhaps it's time to look at something halfway between Monticello (which I
realistically don't have energy to maintain right now) and DVS - ie,
something that still relies on CVS for versioning, but drops backwards
compatibility with chunk file format.  That would allow these kinds of
checks to be made a lot less hackishly, since you'd force people to be
loading the package in the "safe" way.  Thoughts?  Is there any real
reason to keep using chunk format?

Avi