On Jul 19, 2004, at 2:10 PM, Chris Muller wrote:

> Lex wrote:
>
>> 2. My number one desire, which is not on your list, is to stop talking
>> about "the" map.  At the very least, there should be a map per version
>> of Squeak, because in practice packages in Squeak 3.6 are not going to
>> work in Squeak 3.0 unless you make at least a few changes.
>
> I think there are/will-continue-to-be plenty of packages that would 
> work across
> multiple versions of Squeak.  Any "independent" package that does not 
> depend
> highly on the volatile-guts of Squeak.. a Chess engine, for example.
>
> I don't have anything against having another map, but I do like being 
> able to
> go to ONE map for everything I need, no matter what version of Squeak 
> I need it
> for.

Exactly.  There's no need to have a separate map for each Squeak 
version, because you can query a package release in a map to see which 
Squeak version(s) it belongs to anyway.  See 
SMPackageRelease>>isCompatibleWithCurrentSystemVersion for example.  
(You could pretty easily create a #isCompatibleWithSystemVersion: 
method too if you needed one.)

And then if you did have a separate map for each Squeak version, you'd 
have some packages (e.g. a Chess engine) which do work across multiple 
versions, so you'd end up with the same duplicated entry in each 
separate map.

I can agree that supporting multiple maps might be useful, say if some 
universities each want to set up their own local map of goodies, and 
then you want to be able to collect from all of these maps.  But this 
seems like a relatively low priority... the single-map scheme could 
probably support 5000 packages if it needed to.  Certainly dependencies 
are more urgent, at least.

- Doug