new packages in 3.9 universe

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Mon Jan 8 15:48:39 UTC 2007


"J J" <azreal1977 at hotmail.com> writes:
> >From: Lex Spoon <lex at cc.gatech.edu>
> >Right now, there is just one 3.9 universe, just like with 3.7.  So, it
> >is analogous to the "main" section of Debian/sid.  The idea is that
> >developers can augment this with their own extension universes, much
> >like unofficial apt repositories.
> 
> Aha.  I'm afraid I don't know much about the unofficial repos.   I
> don't even know that much about the normal repos, I just feel I have a
> good understanding of how the dependency trees worked (from a user
> perspective).


Unofficial repositories are a neat feature of APT, IMHO.  It makes the
whole system much more flexible, and yet it was easy for them to
implement.  Once the tool supports using multiple mirrors, you are
basically there already.

The idea is that you can have a smaller group separate from the main
group, and still share packages with each other using the same
infrastructure.  The way you do this is to make a separate repository
for the smaller group, and then have everyone in the group register
the URL for that repository on each of their systems.  After that, the
tools just work.  Everyone sees the packages in the separate
repository just as if they were in the main repository.

Squeak itself is distributed in an unofficial apt repository, by the
way.  Debian does not like Squeak's license.


> By "packages", do you mean a concept inside your universes, or like
> Monticello/Squeak Map type packages?

I mean something like an individual Monticello mcz file.
Specifically, a unit of content that can be shared over the network
and loaded into people's images.

A package universe is then the set of packages visible from a specific
image.  This gets interesting when you consider that there are
multiple such universes.  You can develop your killer web-based
application in the 3.9 universe using the latest stable stuff, but
then teach a class using the 3.7 universe, just because the text book
you are using is based on Squeak 3.7.

-Lex




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