On Thursday, September 18, 2003, at 06:10 PM, Mark A. Schwenk wrote:

> I'd like to follow up on a post from 11/21/2002. Stephen's requests 
> match some things I'd like to do with SqueakMap and Monticello. I'm 
> reposting his message because I never saw any followup on it.

[Stephen's post snipped]

Wow, it's hard to believe Monticello is nearly a year old. The gist of 
Stephen's request was that he wanted to be able to define a hierarchy 
of repositories and have facilities for moving versions of packages up 
and down the hierarchy.

We haven't implemented anything like that, basically because it turned 
out to be unnecessary. We do support multiple repositories, so it's not 
hard to accomplish the hierarchical scenario, if that's what you want, 
or other combinations of local/remote, public/private respositories.

Neither have we done any specific integration with SqueakMap, but we 
*have* put a lot of work into making Monticello's internal file format 
suitable for distributing packages. So a package's SqueakMap entry can 
include a link directly to a specific version in a repository. There 
might be useful opportunities for tighter integration when SqueakMap2 
is finished.

> I'd like to be able to pull all the packages from SqueakMap I need 
> into my local repository so that I can track changes the authors make 
> as well as changes I may need for my application.

You can do this today, provided that the package author is also using 
Monticello, and distributes his packages in mcz format. When you 
install such a package, Monticello will create a working copy for it. 
As you make changes you can save them as versions in your own 
repository, and merge in versions published by the author as necessary.

> In addition to these items, I'm wondering how to handle grouping of 
> packages into larger entities, such as "all the packages I need for 
> this application I'm building." I'm not sure if Monticello yet has 
> this concept for a set of packages or set of versions of packages.
>
> It's in some ways related to the loadscripts talked about in the 
> SqueakMap context but loading from Monticello repositories.

No, right now there's no way to group packages in Monticello. It's 
probably something we'll need at some point, but right now I feel like 
we don't have enough experience using Monticello to know how exactly it 
should work. Maybe SqueakMap2 will help with this. If you have any 
thoughts, please share them.

> I'm wondering, what is the Monticello equivalent for something like 
> Envy Configuration Maps or Store Bundles?

As Ned mentioned, you can stick mcz files into a sar for distribution. 
But Monticello doesn't know how to operate on groups of packages.

Colin