"Ralph Johnson" <johnson at cs.uiuc.edu> writes:

> On 17 Aug 2007 17:33:15 -0400, Lex Spoon <lex at lexspoon.org> wrote:
> 
> > Anyway, I plan to add a link to the SqueakMap entry.  SqueakMap seems
> > like a more appropriate place to add all the bits of meta-data you
> > might ever want, including authorship and time stamps.
> 
> Would it be possible to use the SqueakMap entry as a pointer to the
> source?  Some package maintainers have stopped updating their SM entry
> and just use PU.  This is a shame, since SM is the nearest thing we
> have to a catalog of the entire Squeak universe.  But I can see that
> people don't want to keep two systems in synch.  If PU could refer to
> the SM entry then perhaps they could just update their SM entry and
> get the PU entry updated for free.

I would like there to be an easy way to post to both indexes in
addition to others.  That's why I emailed the SqueakSource maintainer
with code that posts a release to a package universe, in the same way
SqueakSource used to do this to SqueakMap.  I got no reply, and last I
heard the SqueakMap button didn't work any longer.  Bummer.  The code
is on the wiki, for people interested in setting up a "post update"
code snippet for their own personal use.

For your concrete suggestion, I do not see how it would help.  You
still have to explicitly post to two services, only now instead of
posting a simple URL to the package universe -- the same URL you'd
paste to SqueakMap -- you'd post a SqueakMap version number.  Isn't it
just as easy to paste the URL into both tools?


Anyway, there is a better way to get SqueakMap holding more content:
have it pull package versions from popular package universes.  At one
swoop this would make SqueakMap hold strictly more content than
package universes.  Plus, the presense of a package in particular
package universes could cause the SqueakMap version to have tags
added.



> > > > 1. Packages should have information such as purpose and maintainer.
> > > >    At the moment there seems to be no such information. Instead it is
> > > > repeated for every version of the package.
> >
> > The maintainer and description can and do change asn time goes on, so
> > it seems better to relist them for each version.
> 
> But people tend to not bother copying the description, so it can be
> hard to find.

That should not be an issue in practice.  Can you point me to a
package where this happened?

Maybe the UI needs improving, but there is already a "new package
version" button in the universe editor.  If you use it, the tool will
automatically copy forward all the fields from the previous release of
the package.



> > Most of the time, anyway, you are only interested in the most recent
> > version of a package.
> 
> One thing that is annoying about PU is all the old versions.  I wish
> maintainers would delete the old versions when they put in the new.

Well, whenever you release 3.10, it will get cleaned out in the
process of releasing the 3.10 stable universe.  :)

I am not sure it is a worthwhile expendature of time for individual
contributors to delete old versions.  They can do so, if they like,
however.  The only potential problem is the one mentioned by the
Viking, that users sometimes *want* to use an old version.  So if it
is really a problem, I believe it would be more helpful to have a
weekly cleaner script that removes all but the most recent two
versions.

Given Damien's new UI, though, it seems like less of an issue
nowadays.


Thanks for the comments everyone,

Lex Spoon