Hi Andreas,

This is only a speculation. If I remember correctly, there was the  
idea that Monticello could be used not only to version and merge code  
but other objects as well, e.g. instances of a business object model.  
As far as I know, no one took that route. However, maybe this was the  
reason why the definition model was not modelled more closely after  
the code model.

As for the potential impact of such a change: Sorry, I cannot help you  
there.

Cheers,
- Bernhard

Am 16.04.2009 um 06:59 schrieb Andreas Raab:

> Hi -
>
> I'm trying to make some modifications to Monticello and ran into an  
> interesting issue: It appears that MC treats all definitions as a  
> flat list and not structured in any way. E.g., MCMethodDefinitions  
> are not contained inside the MCClassDefinitions that they apply to.  
> Why is this?
>
> It seems to me that a bit more structure in MC could greatly help  
> for a variety of issues: From being able to provide a class  
> definition with extension methods (and consequently being able to  
> load packages into images that don't even have the classes  
> originally being extended) over various simplifications and speed  
> improvements in dependency management (e.g., the dependency sorter  
> doesn't need to sort definitions that are contained inside other  
> definitions since the dependency is implicit).
>
> However, it feels like this may have been a conscious decision and I  
> am wondering what the advantage is to treat all definitions as a  
> flat list instead of using the existing dependencies like class/ 
> method hierarchies. I am very seriously considering to change this  
> and would like to know more about the potential impact of such a  
> change.
>
> Thanks for any info,
>  - Andreas
>