Hi

SM has been a success story so far. Just this morning I threw up a
package loader after a long pause using Squeak and I could instantly
load one of the 400 existing packages. This would have been unthinkable
three years ago. Congratulations Göran and the others who helped to put
this in place.

As for centralization / decentralisation: SM is basically a catalogue
and having just one instead of several is surely a great advantage.
Especially if we currently still deal with a few hundered packages and two
hundred developers (which is encouraging though).

The packages themselves are in various places
(though cached in SM AFAIK) and they have a unique ID. So it is possible
to create build scripts with repeatable results which is really
necessary for working in an environement like Squeak which is in
constant flux.

And SM supports different source managment systems.  Currently
there are 5 package formats
http://map1.squeakfoundation.org/sm/category/93f6630c-58a6-42c5-9eb0-a43017bdf1e2

SM is a catalogue with 200 people maintaing the entries - from a
organizsational viewpoint this is far from beeing a centralized solution.

But it works and it works fine.

Cheers
Hannes