[ANN] stable package universe for 3.9

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Tue Nov 21 10:26:36 UTC 2006


"J J" <azreal1977 at hotmail.com> writes:
> >"J J" <azreal1977 at hotmail.com> writes:
> > > Forgive my ignorance, but does every new version of a given package
> > > have to be republished in it's universe?  It sounded like that on the
> > > web page.
> >
> >Yes.  In fact, that is at the core of the system.  If you do not
> >publish Foo version X into a universe, then people using that
> >praticular universe will not even know Foo version X exists.
> >
> 
> Ok, so what that basically means is, if you publish a package at the
> moment, you have to save it to Monticello, publish to squeak map and
> put it in a Universe, right? :)
> 
> It sounds to me like Universes could replace squeak map, right?

Sort of.  I think most developers would be happy to have a package
universe to work within from which they pull most packages.  I think
package universes could replace that one bit of functionality: when a
developer thinks, "I want to load Seaside", then their first stop
could be to go to the universe browser instead of SqueakMap.

That is just one function, though.  SqueakMap remains an important
catalog and archive of all Squeak software that has ever been
publically posted.  Package universes is not that.  By design it is
not that, and I do not see how it ever could be.


> If so, would it be possible to hook into the squeak map (and/or
> Monticello) publishing process so that squeak map publishes cause a
> publish to a universe (or vise versa since the universe publish may
> require more info)?

Things like this are certainly possible.  For example, it would be
great if SqueakSource had a button you could press to post a
package-universes release.

My intuition has been that Monticello commits are more frequent than
actual releases.  That has always been the case for my code.  But
maybe other people work differently?  If so, then indeed it would be
nice to hook into the Monticello commit process, and/or to hook a
Monticello stream directly into a universe.


> That would make migrating to a universe based
> system easier.  The easiest way to get people to use something is (a)
> make it transparently a part of what they did before or (b) make it do
> what they did before and easier for them.

I agree.  Ideas?  Unfortunately, my Squeak coding time is pretty
limited these days, but then again Smalltalk is dense enough that many
workable solutions just take a few lines of code....


-Lex





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