Hi!

Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> There is one fundamental problem with both the SqueakMap and Universes model
 > that has not been mentioned yet: It does not encourage participation. 
For a
 > package author, maintaining a package entry is just an additional burden.
 > And a package user cannot really do much about a broken package entry.
> 
> Contrast that with the Trunk Model: One reason it works is that it takes
 > almost zero effort to participate. You publish a fix to the inbox and 
announce
 > that on squeak-dev. And it's very simple for a core developer to take 
it and
 > commit to the trunk.
> 
> IMHO we need something similarly simple for a package management system for
 > Squeak. Something where it is easy to share. If one user figures out 
how to get
 > a particular package to load, it must be trivial to share that method.
 > And submitting one such "package loading instruction" must not sign 
up the user
 > to be perpetual maintainer of the package.
> 
> So I think the private "ownership" model is flawed. We need a package management
 > system that allows easy contribution. Maybe SqueakMap can be 
restructured for this,
> but currently it seems heavily geared towards single maintainers.

Without going into this in depth there are some things worth mentioning:

- Co-maintainers. Although there is always one owner of a package on SM, 
there can be multiple co-maintainers. And today they can do the same 
things, except change ownership and co-maintainers IIRC. I agree, not a 
medicin here, but worth mentioning.

- Unofficial releases. This was something I toyed with, but never got 
done. The idea is of course that anyone can make a release of a given 
package - but it will marked as a non-official release.

- The new SM model that I have in my head. :) It builds on the 
realization that *almost* everything on SqueakMap is held inside a 
personal account - in other words "information about code and packages 
etc that I want to share with other people". So that would be a very 
nice "partitioning boundary" for a distributed model.

BUT... I agree with you Bert. :)

regards, Göran