Hi Göran,

>"updated every time a new version of a prereq arrives" ??
>
>Personally i want the dependency system to describe "verified working
>configurations" and nothing more. Rules like "any version later than 
>x" are IMHO not so good.

In a notion of verified working sets with specific packages, something 
like this will happen: package A needs C-1.5 and package B needs C-2.0.
You want to have A and B in your image. Now your are stuck. Perhaps 
both would have been happy with C>1.0 . 

But if you want to, you are able to describe a specific package with 
name+version too. 

>I agree. I am all for "simple" solutions like for example "prefix" 
>based namespaces. I have been planning to introduce "Person" in SM 
>which could mean that we can have entries for developers. We could 
>add signing etc and keep the developer "sig" in there too. Having 
>that it would be trivial to start using the "sig" as a prefix/suffic 
>to get guaranteed unique names:
>
>SharedStreams-gh

I must say if we really use PackageName_GlobalName as 'simple name 
spaces' I dislike this idea. PackageName should be chosen as you said: 
short, meaningful, without spaces, just like other Smalltalk 
identifiers ( we are going to code with them = we have to speak them ).
 
BTW, what if not the package rather than the author wants to change 
his name? :) 

Is it not a bit farfetched to envision SM distributed to a hierarchy 
of servers? And if this should really be necessary in some distant 
future, don't you think a central 'nameserver' working with this 
hierarchy would solve this? There are decentralized data structures 
out there relying on some central part, which are much bigger than 
SqueakMap ever will be. 

regards,
Martin