"Pavel Krivanek" <squeak1 at continentalbrno.cz> writes:
> I think that we need better packaging system - maybe something like
> Gentoo has. Packages use property named "use flags" that tell that for
> example MessageTally package may be compiled with the compression
> support.
> 
> Does anybody know next good packaging systems we can learn from?

My take is that the package format itself is only of secondary
importance.  You need to think about how to manage *groups* of
packages.  Once you have an answer to that, everything else gets much
easier.

The idea is that packages come in groups, and groups can be composed
to larger groups.  The most frequent kind of grouping is simply to
have an index stored on a server.  This approach is widely used,
including by Debian and, IIUC, by Gentoo.

A pervasive bad idea is that you can get by with just dependencies and
skip having a notion of groups of packages to draw from.  If you have
no limit to what packages you can choose among, then your information
system has to be impossibly sophisticated.


This "package universes" approach is implemented for both Squeak and
the Scala.

  "Package Universes"
  http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3785
  
  "Scala Bazaars"
  http://www.lexspoon.org/sbaz/


It seems to work out fine.  It is the basis of a "Stable Squeak 3.7"
distribution with 200 packages in it, and that distribution has been
used without problem for hundreds of students at Georgia Tech.


-Lex