Hi folks!

I noticed that there was discussion yesterday on IRC about SM and how to
"get files". Here are some short facts:

1. SM is a catalog. It basically holds URLs for each release of each
package. Those URLs can point anywhere - some point to the SM server
itself because if you get an account on SM you also get the ability to
store files there for your releases.

2. If you bring up the menu on a release in the SqueakMap Package Loader
you see an entry called "force download into cache". If you just want to
get the file and perhaps look at it before installing - you can use this
to download the URL to the SM file cache residing in
"/sm/cache/packages/...". Then when it has downloaded - look in the menu
and use "browse cache" or "copy from cache" to get to the file.

3. The new SM 2.1 also has a server side cache of all release files and
each release now has an SHA checksum associated with the file. If the
regular download fails, for example the SHA check fails - then the
SqueakMap Package Loader will contact the SM server to try to load the
file from there instead. If you have a transcript open you will see
this.

Well, perhaps that made some of you a bit wiser. :)

regards, Göran

PS. The server side cache is populated when a new release is registered.
That is also the time when the SHA checksum is calculated. If for some
reason the cached file is "broken" then the SHA will be broken too and
every download from the original URL will "fail" and it will fall back
on the broken server cached file. If this happens, edit the release and
modify the URL in some way to trigger a new download - I should add a
"refresh cache and checksum"-button there.