About MC for managing the image

[Avi Bryant]

On Sep 18, 2005, at 8:01 AM, stéphane ducasse wrote:
>
> For the second problem (2) above Avi do you know if creating a  
> package named Squeak with all the
> subpackages as required would help minimizing the manual conflicts  
> resolution. I thought that MC
> was supporting an atomic load so I would like to use that as much  
> as possible.

Can you explain what you mean here by manual conflicts resolution?

I do think that using a Squeak package with dependencies, or  
alternatively just changing a Configuration to have a load strategy  
more like a package with dependencies, would be a good idea.  When I  
recently tried updating a 3.9a image through a few configuration  
steps, it was bad enough that it took as long as it did, but it was  
awful that it stopped to ask me about loading over a modified package  
many times during the process - so I couldn't just walk away.  This  
wouldn't happen if MC's multi-package-load mechanism were used  
instead of explicit ordering.  It would also mean you wouldn't  
(usually) have to think about package ordering yourself.  So it  
should speed up the process for everyone.

It also seems like configurations are maybe being posted to the  
update stream too frequently: I doubt I actually needed to go through  
so many intermediate steps to get to the final state.  I assume this  
is why Impara uses the combination of explicitly posted configs, and  
just updating to the most recent versions in a given repository.   
Alternatively, when posting a new configuration to the stream, you  
should remove old ones that are no longer needed or replace them with  
no-ops.

This process is probably hardest on you guys that are doing the  
harvesting.  From the point of view of both submitting patches to  
the /inbox and browsing through histories in a pre-packaged image, I  
very much like the new approach.  So, from where I stand anyway, all  
this pain *is* worth it :)

Avi