Package Update Installation Anomalies

Doug Way dway at mailcan.com
Wed Mar 17 19:03:56 UTC 2004


Lex Spoon wrote:

>A fine answer to the problem of upgrade errors is to treat them as bugs.
> Really, it should work to upgrade any 3.7-ready package on SqueakMap to
>a newer 3.7-ready package.  Whenever it doesn't work, the maintainer
>should be informed.
>

Also a big part of the problem here is managing the maintenance of some 
of these packages.  Some packages aren't actively maintained, but are 
still used, and for these packages we need to have co-maintainers added 
who might be able to keep things working.

>Thus, I don't see the need for better installation and upgrading tools,
>but instead would focus on bug tracking and organization.  In
>particular:
>
>	1. There should be such a thing as 3.7-ready packages again.  There's
>no reason to continue the current sloppiness of marking all  packages as
>available even if the maintainer hasn't touched them for over a year. 
>This was posted about before, but unfortunately interest seems to have
>died down.  It would be very nice if the user saw a completely separate
>package map depending on what Squeak they are looking at it from.
>

Yes.  Although I've been thinking that a better solution to this might 
be to have the SMLoader bring up a confirmation dialog if you try to 
install a package which is not listed as being compatible with your 
current image.  For example:

"You are attempting to install FooPackage, which is listed as being 
compatible with Squeak 3.5, into your Squeak 3.7alpha image, which is 
not guaranteed to work.  Do you still want to proceed with the 
installation?"

>	2. There should be a handy way to report bugs to individual packages. 
>But even without special bug-tracking tools, it is perfectly possible to
>look up the author's email and drop them a message.
>

Yep.  Actually, maybe an "email maintainers" option (which would include 
co-maintainers) could be added to the SMLoader menu.

Also, Anton mentioned that he wished that the SMLoader showed dates for 
the various package releases, which I wholeheartedly agree with.

Yeah, I know, a bunch of SMLoader enhancement requests here, and Goran 
already has plenty of other stuff to do. :-)  (And I have too much other 
stuff to do at the moment too.)  These enhancements wouldn't be too 
difficult, though... maybe someone could work on them as a mini-project 
and submit them to the list.

- Doug





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