On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Which raises an interesting general question: In this age of having
> everything at SqueakMap do we actually have a way of tracking changes
> between versions of packages?

Well, for any package I maintain, you could use viewcvs at sourceforge to
browse the commit logs and get a (textual) diff between any two versions.
You could also use Monticello to see the diff in the image, if you had
both package files handy.

Better, of course, would be an all-Squeak repository that didn't rely on
CVS for anything.  Colin and I got a whole lot closer to that this
weekend; we're close to releasing a new Monticello that saves version
history with every package snapshot (as in, which previous package
versions is this version descended from), which means that when you send
one of those snapshots to somebody else, not only can they load it into
their image and have the appropiate additions and removals take place
(like DVS), but they can also choose to *merge* it, which will use the
version history to find the closest common ancestor with the image, do a 3
way diff based on that, ask the user to resolve any conflicts, and then
load the resulting merged snapshot.

With a directory full of these versioned snapshots, you could easily build
a tool that reconstructed the entire history of the package, and produce
nice diffs or annotated source.  The nice thing about the approach we're
taking, though, is that there's no inherent requirement for a centralized
repository... if people just want to email snapshots around, that's fine.

Avi