On further thought, I have another way to put the situation.

When you build a distribution of packages, there is an important role
for "repackagers".  The importance of repackaging is obvious for a
system like Debian, where the vast majority of the packages were not
made with Debian in mind at all.  It's important for Squeak, too,
because different people have different style and standards for the
packages they post.  Even when all the packages are for Squeak, they
are not always good out of the box for a particular distribution.

Keith's installer boot scripts are one way to repackage an existing
package.  They put a wrapper around an existing package, thus making a
new package.

An alternative, though, is simply to modify the original package and
repost it somewhere else.  Additionally, I suspect that if we *had* at
least one major distribution of Squeak packages, then package writers
would start making their stuff compatible with at least the main
distro, thus reducing the need for repackaging at all.


-Lex