On 13 févr. 05, at 17:16, Lex Spoon wrote:

> Doug Way <dway at mailcan.com> wrote:
>> Is there a situation where you'd have the global list of PI instances
>> in a more minimal image, but not have SqueakMap installed?  Could be,
>> but that might be uncommon.  I was thinking that the Minimal image
>> would still have the PI instances, which means PackageInfo would need
>> to be part of the Kernel, but I don't know if that's necessary.  As
>> long as it can add code to itself.  (That is when we take a serious
>> look at Spoon. :) )
>
> It violates the privacy principle.  It is fine that SM must be loaded,
> because it's part of the basic code-management infrastructure of 
> Squeak.
>  However, surely people should be able to make a package without 
> posting
> it immediately to SqueakMap.  In such a case, there is no SMPackage
> entry, but you'd still like to have author, comment, and homepage url.
> I call this the privacy principle for real.  Personal images should not
> need to make round trips to a global server in order to do basic
> operations like creating a package.

exact!

> Is it possible to whip up a SMPackage entry that is not attached to any
> actual SqueakMap?  My impression has been that this doesn't make sense.
> If this one principle were to change--and a SqueakMap became simply a
> list of packages that can be copied between multiple SqueakMap's
> including a local per-image map--then I'd sing a different tune here.
>
>
> Notice that the universes system *does* support packages which are not
> associated with any particular server.  (And as a cost of this 
> property,
> a single universe cannot sensibly hold a catalog of *every* publically
> shared package.)  The way this discussion is going, I believe Universes
> can be modified to deal in whatever PackageInfo we end up with.  A
> UPackage could then be a PackageInfo plus a UVersion.
>
> The one thing that would need to be done, would be for PackageInfo to
> have a list of dependencies.  A set of string names is fine.  Ideally,
> it should also have "provides" and "conflicts", even though the current
> algorithm in the univeres browser doesn't deal with these yet.
>
>
> -Lex
>