I agree that overall, Debian has a decent package system worth
considering.  I don't know of a good introduction to it, but chapters 2
and 3 of Debian's Policy Manual seem to at least describe the parts that
would be relevant to us:

	http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/


There's nothing very fancy about it, but they might have thought of
things we didn't.


By the way, another very handy part of Debian is their Bug Tracking
System.  You can then post bugs to all packages in the same manner.  But
that's an orthogonal issue, I suppose.

	http://www.debian.org/Bugs/



> Squeak: Well, currently we have something similar - but we lack the "module" granularity which has
> made it problematic to maintain the gamma and the offical relase ("stable" and "testing").
> Eventuall we all end up in the alpha stream! :-) This is not so good, but I think it would be much
> simpler if we where dealing with new versions of modules instead of with small changesets.
> 

I don't think we're so different.  The same type of people that use
alpha Squeak, use unstable Debian.  Nobody wants to wait for the newest
features.



> I think we could introduce some form of "forwarder" file in order to make the virtual hierarchy
> distributed.

Interesting idea.  Although, Debian has scaled to 800 developers and
8000 packages using a central ftp server, so it's not clear we *have* to
worry about this.  Also, and I'm sure you have thought of this, we
surely want to leave the ability to have multiple root servers listed
even if we have the forwarders.


-Lex