[squeak-dev] Squeak Package Management

Damien Pollet damien.pollet at gmail.com
Thu Jun 26 20:07:14 UTC 2008


On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 9:28 PM, Matthew Fulmer <tapplek at gmail.com> wrote:
> SqueakMap: Packages are out-of-date, because the security model
> does not allow anyone to maintain the package; also, there are
> no dependencies
>
> Universes addressed the dependency issue, but still does not
> allow widely distributed maintenance of the packages. So far,
> it is kept mostly up-to-date, due to a few motivated
> individuals.
>
> Sake/Packages is an attempt to address both of the above
> concerns. It as yet has no UI. Unlike in SM or Universes, the
> entire distribution is versioned as a whole, rather than the
> individual packages, so editing one package means making a new
> distribution version. This makes it easy to specify exactly what
> version of the database your image is up-to-date with, but does
> not scale if there are many contributions.


I don't see the point of having completely separate tools/websites for
code management (SqueakSource/MC) and package management (all others).
I want to configure an image as a user, then decide that I want to
contribute on such package, and upgrade it to the devel snapshot with
the same tool.

Package management and code version control are really the same thing,
just at different levels of granularity.

As a developer, you want the bleeding edge version of the code most of
the time, but also need flexibility (load older versions, branches,
bypass dependancies). You do need dependancies if only for the
documentation value (it's always a pain when code is split in several
packages and you have to checkout each of them manually).

As a user, you want no hassles, ie. a complete and up-to-date package
set with dependancies between stable blessed versions that work. Also,
feature-oriented rather than code-oriented packages, ie. Seaside
instead of all the dozen actual class categories.

Of course these are just two points somewhere in a continuum: paranoid
users will only use bare major release images, power-users will want
more recent packages at the price of more frequent updates and less
stability. Even developers are only developers for a subset of their
image and users for all the rest.

So for me, SqueakSource with practical dependancies and the
possibility to make actual releases would be the best. Maybe the
dependancy/release handling can be done by merging SM  or
Sake-Packages metadata into MC snapshots, but I do believe that it
should be a single integrated application.

-- 
Damien Pollet
type less, do more [ | ] http://people.untyped.org/damien.pollet



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