It was automated, many moons ago. I use this almost every day.
Two questions:
- 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.
- 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.