It is interesting to watch the Squeak community repeat the development
the Debian people have gone through for their packaging system.  Perhaps
we can make progress faster, if we look at their conclusions and at what
issues they considered.

Their package files are just like our SAR files, only using "ar" format
instead of "zip".  There are four control files for loading and
unloading: two for loading, two for unloading.

	http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-maintainerscripts.html
	
These scripts get run with arguments, so that the scripts can do
different things if, e.g., the package is being re-installed.

Additionally, the preinst and postinst scripts are used for
configuration questions.  In fact, the standard way to configure any
Debian package, is to re-run the postinst script with "configure" as an
argument!  After all, the initial configuration and the later
reconfiguration should be the same, right?  Thus, use the same code.

In general, as Goran suggests, you have to trust the developer to get
the scripts right.  That is inevitable, in a reasonably flexible system.
 We should automate loading and unloading as much as possible, but it is
far too onerous to actually enforce clean unloading.  It is probably
impossible, if people uninstall packages in a different order than they
installed them.


Configuration in general is something we need to address eventually, but
it can wait until after the basic format is together.  Issues to
consider are: how do you ask questions, if you don't know what kind of
GUI is around?  (Debian's answer: there is a registry of question-asking
toolkits, and users can pick which one they want to use.)  How much
detail should the user be asked?  (Debian's answer: the user has a
preference, with values: low, medium, high, critical.)


-Lex