Package maintenance

Adam Spitz adspitz at yahoo.ca
Thu Oct 9 08:56:12 UTC 2003


ducasse at iam.unibe.ch wrote:

> Between 3.5 and 3.6 some packages have been removed and alex did
> a changeset Splitter to move the change related to class in
> different packages automatically.

And avi at beta4.com wrote:

> Right now you're just saying "changesets suck", and, well, we
> know this already.  Please, tell us why Monticello sucks
> instead.

Brent Vukmer and I talked about something like this a while ago. We
ended up needing one or two things from MC that I'm not sure are in
there yet (though I might be wrong, and they'd be easy to implement
anyway). Here's what I want the BFAV to look like:

I bring up the BFAV. It shows me a list of all the SqueakMap packages
that are affected by entries in the BFA. I notice that the Wobulator
package, which I own, is on the list. I choose the Wobulator package
from the list, and the BFAV shows me the Wobulator-related entries in
the BFA. I click on an entry, hit the "accept" button, type in the
Wobulator password, and it extracts the Wobulator-related changes from
that entry, incorporates them into the SqueakMap package, and marks the
BFA entry as "closed with respect to Wobulator".

To create a system like that, here's what we'd need:

  - The ability to look at a code file (which can be a Monticello file;
I don't care about raw changesets) and determine which PackageInfo-style
packages it affects. (I suspect that Monticello can do this already.)
  
  - The ability to take a code file and extract a *new* code file
containing only the changes that affect a particular PackageInfo-style
package.
  
  - SM2, so that we can annotate SM packages with names of
PackageInfo-style packages, so that we can figure out which code changes
affect which SM packages.
  
  - A one-click way to incorporate a patch into an SM package. (Maybe
something like Andreas Raab's UpdateStreams for SqueakMap. I don't know
much about it.)
  
  - A way to mail MC files to the list that's just as easy as using the
ChangeSorter to mail off a changeset file. (Maybe the ChangeSorter could
automatically send MC files instead of changesets whenever MC is
installed and the changeset doesn't contain anything that MC can't
model. Or maybe the Monticello Browser should just have a "mail to list"
button. Whatever.)

We're not far from being able to implement something like this. And I
think it would go a long way toward repairing the damage that we're
doing by ripping all of these packages out of the image. :) With a
system like this, the KCP or MCP guys would be able to work in a nice,
Full image, make whatever sweeping changes they want, and mail them to
the list, and the maintainers of all the affected packages would be
automatically alerted and be able to incorporate the changes into their
packages easily.

I'm sure I'm reinventing some wheel here. :)


Adam



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