I saw the site includes discussion about having local repositories, and
also about using repositories for holding things other than modules,
like documentation, and preferences files.

I tend to agree, and wanted to note that SCAN does a lot of this. A few
points -
* SCAN includes a server and a client, working in MVC and Morphic. The
Server is also web accessible for reading.
* SCAN manages hierarchies of Containers, within which are Items. Items
can be modules, for example, or they can be other files, eg,
documentation, preferences.
* SCAN allows you to define distributions, so if you say a file is
"private" (your preferences) it stays on you disk. When you make a
module's distribution is the "world", that means you'll be able to sign
it and publish it.

Having all these, I think we should definitely look at it (the living
implementation, not just the SCAN and Collage page on the swiki) before
we start cloning. http://squeak.heeg.de/ seems like a good place to
start.

A few things I miss in SCAN -
* No concurrency, because no shared write access. If I can write to it,
you can't. This is bad, because it's not what I'd like to have as a
collaborative process. Though it's still better than what we have today
- "SqC can write to it, you can't. Wait for the Harvesters response,
right after they deal with all the other changes posted, ever, to
everything."
* No integration with other tools. No "get me this module's latest
version" from the Browser. No "make a new version of that module with
this changeset". This should probably be fixed by integrating SCAN, the
new modules work, and the system tools, which is loads of work we have
ahead of us.

Daniel

Henrik Gedenryd <Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se> wrote:
> I have now created a page on the swiki for building documentation about the
> modules system. Currently it lists the specification that exists, plus
> copies of mail discussions that may be helpful.
> 
> http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2042&