Hi all,


maybe I am missing some central Squeak tool, but I have never been happy with the current way to update all installed third-party packages in Squeak - because I don't know anyone. Please allow me to give you a short outline of the tool I would like to use for updating packages:


There should be a simple button in the Squeak Menu, just below "Update image", named "Update packages", that enables you to install the latest versions of all installed packages for which a remote does exist.  In addition, if I made any change to a package, it should be possible to merge the updates into my working copy. In particular, this does not only include Squeaksource packages but also packages from GitHub, BitBucket, etc. Great packages such as Autocompletion, MethodWrappers, Vivide, or Squot (see below) that are all hosted on GitHub and can be installed using a Metacello script.

So how much of this is reality and how much is fiction today?
For packages installed from Squeaksource, I can open them in the Monticello Browser and load or merge the latest version. At least, this works, but we could need a button to do this for all available packages where a "default remote" is selected.
But for packages managed via git, this is not possible at all! The Monticello Browser does not know their remote repositories that were used to install the packages originally. Without extra settings made per repository baseline, you cannot even re-load a package again via the install script, see also this open issue: https://github.com/Metacello/metacello/issues/513 Meanwhile, I have made a habit of cloning all interesting projects via Squot in order to update them, even if I do not plan to commit to them ...

I believe there is also something like SqueakMap which has an "Update" and an "Upgrade" button, but this tool is only made for accessing the Squeaksource, is this correct? From what I can see, Squeaksource and SqueakMap have become less important compared to GitHub (the reasons might include better visibility/explorability of projects, a more efficient VCS, and features like issues/pull requests; but that's probably not the point here).

What do you think? Am I the only one facing this issue? How would a roadmap for such a tool look like? Looking forward to your ideas! :-)

Best,
Christoph
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