>From: stephane ducasse <stephane.ducasse at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: History and thoughts about "how" we work on the image together
>Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 13:47:51 +0200
>
>>Consider if we just set such a thing up and let developers "go wild".
>>The maintainers of each separate piece could then track this thing and
>>"shout" if they saw something go astray. Or simply roll back or "fix"
>>changes that missed the mark. And they could then take "sanctioned"
>>snapshots of their each package and put that in a repo.
>

I missed this email originally it looks like.  But what if every MC 
repository had two branches.  One for "bleeding edge" type things where 
anyone from the comunity can write their changes, and a "production line" 
repository where the package maintainer could publish what he liked from the 
submissions to make the stable branch.  Then the squeak map concept could be 
changed to just look in these places for the packages (or at least it could 
be an option).

I don't know what package maintainers are/were in the current/previous 
system, but in most OSS projects of any size they wind up being people who 
mostly merge changes of others (and run the test suite against it, etc., 
etc.) AFAIK.

And taking a concept like this even further, change systems like DVS usually 
have a way to maintain multiple branches at the same time (i.e. gcc 3.* 
still maintained while 4.* is being worked on and even released).  Perhaps 
if the back end repository where some kind of seaside application, as 
opposed to a file system, then we could automatically have such branching.  
Someone checks in a new version for 4.* and the system just creates a new 
section for it.  And the maintainer has some kind of switch to say in what 
branch to look for the official release, so that squeakmap and friends know 
where to look.

Just a thought.  Don't know if it's possible, reasonable or desirable. :)