Package Info collisions can be identified

Peter William Lount peter at ActiveInfo.CA
Fri Jan 23 03:16:49 UTC 2004


Hi,

Package collisions cause a lot of problems with loading multiple packages. 

Two kinds of package collisions are when two packages define the same class or additional methods on classes not in the package.

Are there any tools for discovering (all the) package collisions in the current squeak map?

The Version Number package and the KomPackaging BOTH define VersionNumber.

When a class, method or group of those are removed from one package and put into another package, the package that they were removed from needs to have a new version publised that removes the specific code. 

IF a package has "alternate" versions of a class or method that is defined in another package we need some way to identify this in the SqueakMap so that potential loading and running problems can be avoided.

A tool that can load all the packages in the squeak map and identify all package collisions would be very useful and save us all a great deal of time and effort. If this tool were somehow part of the squeak map it could show these conficts so that people could avoid them and alert others to fix them (i.e. the specific package maintainers).

I have a package management system (a very simple one) that includes at the beginning of the file a list of all the classes and methods, sorted alphabetically,  within the package for humans to read (this would be nice to add to Montecillo ;--). This concept could be extended so that Squeak Map could read this list and quickly find the collisions in classes, class categories and methods. Alternatively the entire package needs to be scanned (I think there is a browser that does somthing like this so you can view the source without loading it).

What do you think?

All the best,

Peter William Lount
peter at smalltalk.org
peter at activeinfo.ca
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