[squeak-dev] Re: About Configurations

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Wed Jul 14 02:27:59 UTC 2010


On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 06:41:13PM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
> On 7/13/2010 6:09 PM, Colin Putney wrote:
> >Well, in that case, we're effectively talking about SqueakMap, right? 
> >Maybe implemented differently, but basically a catalog of things you can 
> >install, with some metadata about how to actually perform the install, 
> >using a method appropriate to the package.
> 
> Well, I don't *think* of it as SqueakMap but the comparison is somewhat 
> appropriate. The main reason why I don't think of it as SM is that SM 
> wants to be "all packages ever created for Squeak" but what we need is 
> "all packages that we've actually tested to work in this image". And of 
> course there are some other differences (like community ownership 
> instead of individual ownership of the catalog elements) but other than 
> that I agree; it would probably be quite similar to SM in what it does.

I think that perhaps a closer analogy is Lex's Universes:

  http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3786
  http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3785

That concept has been poorly applied (which may in itself indicate a flaw
in the concept, though I prefer to view it as lack of the necessary
benevolent dictatorship). But the ideas behind it were and still are
quite valid.

Of course Goran has previously discussed merging SM and Universes, which
would have been great if somebody had actually done it. The basic idea is
that SqueakMap is "all packages ever created for Squeak" and a Universe
is "all packages that we've actually tested to work in this image". The
two together are a package management system.

Hopefully we can now move those concepts forward. Metacello seems to
offer a way to provide a map to all known packages as well as a clear
definition of how to load the right version of each into a given image.
If we can add a thin layer to describe the subset of the Metacello
map that constitutes the universe of things that work in this image,
then we have more or less exactly what Goran and Lex intended, with
the additional benefit that it all works nicely with Monticello.

Dave




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