>> It was automated, many moons ago.  I use this almost every day.
>>
>>   http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5603
>>
>
> Two questions:
>
> 1) Can this capability be made available and visible in the browsers that
> most of us use every day?

It already is.  It uses the Service registry stuff to register two new
capabilities for the methods menu and the class-list menu.  The
screenshot at the above link is a picture of those standard menus
after loading Magma into your image.  They will be grayed-out unless
you add a Magma-based MC repository to the package of whatever method
you're browsing.

> 2) Why aren't we (all of us including most especially myself) paying more
> attention to Magma and making use of it as supporting infrastructure? It
> seems blindingly obvious that this would be a good way to support shared
> access to a database of Squeak version history.

Magma lacks a user-account model necessary to host a shared repository
directly on the Internet (not to mention, the challenges of finding a
hosting service that will let you run a Squeak image to serve up a
proprietary binary protocol..??).

Which leaves the only option would be to have a WEB front-end on a
with a Magma DB on the backend.  This can be done, but it requires
careful attention to performance considerations -- where increasing
the number of session connections to the DB can increase throughput,
but also the costs of transparently keeping those sessions consistent
and up-to-date with the model -- the wonderfullest aspect of Magma --
intrudes into the performance of the web-app, driving the developer to
use simpler databases.

But for this one use-case, there is no reason anyone who develops in
Squeak could not create their own Magma repository on their LAN and
copy all Versions from one or more MC repository into it in just a few
minutes.  Just doing that provides the version-lookup and MC
method-history capabilities directly in the browsers.