Subject: Re: Squeak Map server is down?

Hannes Hirzel hirzel at spw.unizh.ch
Tue Aug 10 15:33:04 UTC 2004


Hello

Andreas Raab wrote:

>Hm... does anyone besides me see the irony of this thread considering
Gorans
>recent rant on the dangers of package universes?! To quote Goran:

>> But I am very afraid of the effects when people start setting up their
>> own little maps all over the place with lots of duplication,
redundancy,
>> synch problems, servers being down/up, servers simply being unknown
>> etc... well. Obviously this doesn't scare you at all, which I don't
>> understand why.

>It seems that a decentralized system (as always) outperforms any
centralized
>one when it comes to resiliency. Point in case: While SM is down and out,
>the package universes are up and running.


Quick conclusion but, I wouldn't call it a correct one.
There is even no irony there.

SM and universes are not the same thing.
If I want the service of SqueakMap I want that because it has been proved
useful in
the past and then I do not want to deal  with another catalogue
which has been cobbeled together in a few days and is not proven.

In the TeX/LaTeX-world I have a central catalogue of everything. There
are several physical servers but from the logical point of view it is just
_one_ server.  ( http://www.ctan.org/ )

The same thing applies for the Perl community ( http://www.cpan.org/ )
which by the way has many more packages than Squeak and they
didn't see the necessity for a fork of their catalogue. And BTW it
helps do book CDs and things like that.

CONCLUSION:
A general catalogue is a service to a whole community and
a physically reliable service is what is needed. So the conclusion is
that we need a mirror of SM in the future (not a duplicate effort
concept-wise).
In the meantime if the downtime is not long it is not a big issue.


Regards
Hannes



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list