On 6/10/2011 0:39, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> Loading all packages found is not a good idea. We only want to load the packages mentioned in the config, and do it in the order given.
>
> What should work, IMHO, is when uploading a new config, only update those package versions that need changing. That is, take latest config, change version for the package you need updated, publish. There currently is no UI for this, it only allows "update from image" and "update from repository" which updates all packages. But if individual packages could be updated that should work faster.

I have a few doubts about how well this would work. Here is why: Let's 
assume the last config had Kernel-Foo.1.mcz in it. You update happily 
and when you're done (w/o any update.mcm) you're at Kernel-Bar.99.mcz. 
Now you find that you have an ordering problem which makes it so that 
Sockets-MeToo.123 needs to be loaded before updating Sockets further. 
According to your logic, this would now mean that the MCM combines 
Kernel-Foo.1.mcz with Sockets-MeToo.123 even though you've most likely 
developed Sockets-MeToo.123 on top of Kernel-Bar.99. And if loading 
those two together will work you'll only find out if someone actually 
updates from first principles; if people keep their images updated 
regularly they could be quite a ways past Kernel-Foo.1 already and may 
not even notice the problem. I'll also point out that we've had this 
particular problem a few of times already and it was a major pain to go 
back and fix the configs so that updating from first principles works 
again. I really wouldn't want to make this worse.

That said, let me ask a different question: Why is it a problem to have 
200 MCMs? If you're updating from 4.0 to 4.3 you are updating through 
two and a half versions of Squeak, work that took two years total by the 
entire community. That doesn't strike me as too much. The only thing I'd 
like to have is to be able to update such images to particular 
checkpoints (i.e., load the updates from 4.0 -> 4.1, 4.1 -> 4.2, etc).

Cheers,
   - Andreas