Another Monticello/SAR question

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Fri Feb 13 20:46:39 UTC 2004


On Feb 13, 2004, at 10:36 AM, Steven Swerling wrote:

> Would it be fair to say that SqueakMap, SAR, and Monticello have 
> matured to the point that a thorough HOWTO for creating well behaved 
> packages could now safely be written?

Well, not really.  The long run answer to what you describe (which is a 
single MC package with dependencies?) would be for you just to register 
the .mcz file directly with SM, and tell SM about the dependencies.  
The SMLoader should then take care of notifying the user about the 
various extra packages that will need to be loaded for them and so on.

Unfortunately, SM doesn't have dependencies yet, and so a SAR with 
preamble is the only good workaround solution.  Göran and Ned are the 
experts on how this should work... it's been a while since I've 
actually looked at SARBuilder.

We really, really need dependencies in SM - I'm tempted to add them in 
the quickest and dirtiest way I can and then hope the community bullies 
Göran into including them even though they're not done "right"...

> Also, I'd like to provide a good 'unload' procedure. My guess is that 
> the best way to do this is to have Monticello unload it, and also to 
> somewhere override the #removeFromSystem method to do all the 
> unregistering and severing of pointers and dependencies. Is this the 
> best way? It assumes MC is in the image, however -- perhaps 
> MCInstaller, which seems to be headed for base image inclusion, could 
> be beefed up to include an unloader too, so it's presence can be 
> relied upon.

Yeah, this could be done, I guess.  I hate doing too much in 
MCInstaller, though, it was really only intended as a bootstrap... and 
unloading seems like an uncommon enough operation to me that requiring 
MC to be loaded first doesn't seem awful.



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