[Squeakfoundation] SqueakMap in the image (was Re: Incorporating removals & KCP stuff)

[Daniel Vainsencher]

goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:
> Or putting it another way - making a competitor to SM or DVS would be in
> many ways counterproductive since these tools in some ways work their
> magic by turning into de facto standards for the community. Much better
> to cooperate on them. :-)
I disagree in general - alternative solutions to the problem DVS solves,
for example, don't hurt the community, because their functionality is
more important than the synergy of sharing the same format. This is
because the different formats do not add significant issues, because SM
makes hides them by abstracting the install option. So a "better DVS"
(just an example) is a good thing. 

SM specifically, OTOH, derives most of it's benefits from the network
effect (everyone is putting his package in one place, and everyone looks
for code in one place), and thus two incompatible catalogs would
probably be worth less than just one, functionality almost
not-withstanding. So SM competitors would be hard pressed to provide
real value.
 
> And that is btw one of the reasons I really want opinions on SM. Since a
> few important issues were reaised on the list recently I am in the
> process of writing down how SM1.1 will work on:
It's been a couple of months since the last time I said this, so I
consider it borderline-polite-nagging ;-). 

IMO, nothing matters as much as that you release something as soon as
possible that supports package releases. 
- Details of distribution of the DB is unimportant. 
- UUIDs vs. names is unimportant. 
- Caching is unimportant. 

Why? because releases in SM allow dependencies to be handled in various
intelligent ways, which would save people like Stephan from inventing
their own schemes that are non-scalable simply because versions are not
supported. Such a release would let loose the next "avalanche" of
progress in the package handling aspects of Squeak. Also, while 3.6
release is pretty far away, we do need to start seeing how we actually
handle releases in and after it, and to do that we need SM 1.1.

So please do whatever you can to release asap, we need SM1.1 now! :-)

Daniel