"David T. Lewis" <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> Isn't this what Lex is proposing with his "Universes" idea?  A "snapshot"
> of some subset of SM at some known configuration, from which you can select
> packages and be reasonably confident that you have grabbed the right ones.


Yes, it is.  The 3.7 stable universe is now closed to updates (and will
be posted within a couple of weeks I hope).  Thus, if you download a
3.7universes image a year from now, you'll get almost the same packages
as you'd get if you downolad it a month from now.  To contrast, if you
download a 3.7final image a year from now and then start loading "3.7
releases" from SqueakMap, you will get a different set of packages,
because various packages will have been updated and tested for
compatibility with 3.7final.  That's great and desirable behavior, but
it is different from a stable release of an entire set of packages.

Philosophically, please notice that the universes design has a place to
put these policies: universe servers consult a Policy object before
allowing any changes to be made.  SqueakMap does not.  This is a good
example of the different priorities of SqueakMap and Universes:
SqueakMap after years of development has gotten along fine without
policies, but Universes got policies within it's first 2-day
implementation.



All this said, the "release packages" that Goran mentioned he is
thinking about, may well support policies.  If nothing else, they will
probably support informal policies simply due to there only being one
person (or one committee) who knows the password of thhe account that
owns the release package.  We will see how it goes!


-Lex