On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 06:53 PM, Ned Konz wrote:

> On Thursday 06 February 2003 03:20 pm, Ken G. Brown wrote:
>> (using 3.5alpha) I tried downloading after the first
>> select of Connectors 1.9, then tried again after deselecting and
>> selecting again without changing the checkboxes in between. Still
>> no go, no .SAR. Here's the Transcript of the Install and attempt to
>> download.
>
> OK, I just tried this.
>
> I had to load the "SARInstaller for 3.4" package first manually before
> downloading/installing Connectors would work.
>
> It appears that we need to address these SqueakMap problems:
>
> * many packages that are 3.4 compatible are also 3.5a compatible (and
> should be marked as such?)

Hm, this same issue came up when 3.4alpha was created from 3.2, and all 
of the packages in SqueakMap at that point were only listed as being 
compatible with 3.2.  Eventually, the package maintainers updated their 
packages to also be compatible with 3.4 (assuming the packages were 
indeed compatible with 3.4).

The general problem here is that at this moment, the 3.4gamma and 
3.5alpha images are pretty much identical, so for now all 
3.4-compatible packages are also 3.5(alpha)-compatible, and so a lot of 
package maintainers will probably just add "3.5" compatibility to their 
package.  But then 3.5alpha will be undergoing lots of changes over the 
next few months, and some packages will become incompatible.  I'm not 
sure there's a perfect solution to this problem.  (Well, long-term, the 
image will be split up into packages/modules which will rely on a 
separate dependencies mechanism and the image-compatibility thing won't 
matter that much.  But that's still a ways off.)

Maybe one solution would be to show immediately previous version 
packages while the image is alpha, but when it switches to beta, stop 
showing them.  For example, 3.4-compatible packages would show up in 
SMLoader if you're using 3.5alpha, but not for 3.5beta.  This would 
force maintainers to decide whether their package really worked with 
the beta/final image, since the beta image would be pretty close in 
functionality to the final image.  Eh, that's not a perfect solution 
either, but it's something. :-)

(Side issue: Goran needs to add "Squeak3.5" to the list of available 
versions on SqueakMap.)

> * The approprate installer packages should be loaded when SqueakMap is
> loaded. Perhaps the load is also being confused by the version
> number.

This definitely sounds like a bug/problem which should be fixed.

- Doug Way