On Friday, October 10, 2003, at 08:16 PM, Avi Bryant wrote:

> I do think that packages have become central enough that we're now 
> ready
> to move away from this lazy, highly non-intrusive notion of package and
> start being ever so slightly more aggressive about packaging - for
> example, by thinking about what kinds of tool support we want to have 
> in
> the base image for managing packages (this is separate from Monticello,
> MudPie, etc, which use the package system but do not define it).  I 
> would
> like at the least to have:
>
> - a simple UI for viewing and modifying which packages exist in the 
> image
> - an FileList-like registry for adding context-menu items and/or 
> buttons
> to this UI
> - images to come with the core packages actually predefined as packages
>
> Of course ideally we would also start modifying the browsers, etc, to 
> be
> more package savvy as well.

This all sounds good to me.

One further step that could be taken at some point (might be too 
"aggressive" right now) would be to have a further restricted package 
type which would be defined as a PackageInfo package is (new classes 
plus loose methods), but it would not allow methods to be overwritten 
upon loading.  Such a package type would be trivially unloadable.  This 
is roughly how Envy packages worked (and Ginsu modules, I think).  
Unload capability would be pretty nice. :-)

(Of course you would still allow other packages types which could 
overwrite methods, but they would not be marked as unloadable.)

- Doug