Just wanted to say:

	Keep it up Marcus. You are currently topping my list of Squeak heros.
Really.

We all know that the current setup is suffering badly from the current
tool support. What we desperately need to do is of course to:

	1. Fix the tool situation. If that means moving to something different
or just get MC fixed in various ways, I dunno. I have a hackish idea
that I am playing with a bit - see below.

	2. Get the Teams rolling. I intend to get my ass into the I/O team,
but... well, there are so many things to do.


Ok, so my idea on the tools situation is a drastic one - but possibly
interesting enough (and fun) to at least play around with:

I use darcs (www.darcs.net) for all my non-Squeak projects. It is a
truly remarkable distributed SCM which is one of the few SCMs totally
focused around "patches" (think ChangeSets). It has fantastic merging
capacities, patch-dependency resolution and above all - it offers
"cherry picking". IMHO it is the most advanced SCM out there at the
moment.

Anyway, it is hard to explain - but it rocks. And Slate uses it btw. :)

So my idea is this:

	- Bring back MonticelloCVS into life but hack it to use Darcs instead.
	- Possibly align the Darcs patches with ChangeSets. So when you "pull"
patches from a repo you could pull one at a time, synch with Squeak and
produce a ChangeSet for each.
	- Possibly rewrite ChangeSet so that it is less brainless. IMHO it
should actually *contain* the methods and not just point to the current
method.

The vision is this:

- You point your MonticelloDarcs to x number of Darcs repos. A darcs
repo is just a http/ftp area (if you run readonly).
- You "pull" patches and darcs interactively asks which ones you want to
pick. You can cherry pick only the ones you want and darcs will pull any
dependent patches as needed!
- When you work you can use the changesorters to rearrange/group your
edits (just as in the old days, kinda) and then you "record" selected
changesets into the darcs repo.
- You push selected patches to other repos - typically we use a similar
approach that MC has with repos associated with packages etc.

This is kinda like a new breed of "update streams", but working in
harmony with MC, reviving ChangeSets (because they are nice - if we
improve them just a teeny bit) and piggybacking on the very advanced
capabilities of darcs (patch dependencies, magical merges etc).

Well, it is just an idea. Possibly this can be used in harmony with MC -
after all - both setups use PI as package boundary. MC could be used to
produce "snapshots" for distribution on SqueakMap or just as baselines.

Ok, over and out. I am sure that Avi, Bert, Colin or any other MC gurus
can help us shoot this idea down. :)

regards, Göran

PS. I have successfully used netcat (an external small program) and
SocketStream in order to communicate with the stdin/stdout of darcs.
Darcs goes into interactive mode for the more complex commands and this
works out great. AFAIK OSProcess doesn't support stdin/out, at least not
on Win32.