On Sat, Aug 18, 2007 at 10:41:49PM -0500, Ralph Johnson wrote:
> On 17 Aug 2007 17:33:15 -0400, Lex Spoon <lex at lexspoon.org> wrote:
> 
> > Anyway, I plan to add a link to the SqueakMap entry.  SqueakMap seems
> > like a more appropriate place to add all the bits of meta-data you
> > might ever want, including authorship and time stamps.
> 
> Would it be possible to use the SqueakMap entry as a pointer to the
> source?  Some package maintainers have stopped updating their SM entry
> and just use PU.  This is a shame, since SM is the nearest thing we
> have to a catalog of the entire Squeak universe.  But I can see that
> people don't want to keep two systems in synch.

This sounds right to me. I maintain a number of packages, and it's more
than enough work to keep the SqueakMap entries up to date and functional
(the latter being a separate issue). If someone wants to maintain (for
example) a specialized Package Universe that includes TimeZoneDatabase,
it's a good thing if they can do it without my intervention, and it's
a good thing for me to be able to update the SqueakMap entry with a new
release of TimeZoneDatabase without needing to know about all of the
possible dependent Package Universes.

> If PU could refer to
> the SM entry then perhaps they could just update their SM entry and
> get the PU entry updated for free.

The idea of having the PU entry be updated for free when SM is updated
should not apply to source, because the PU entry for a Universe has to
point to a known-good SM release version, not to the latest and greatest
version (of course). That said, it would certainly be nice if there was
an easy way for a user of an older Package Universe to see that there
is (for example) a more recent version of TimeZoneDatabase than the one
that is marked as known-good for that particular Universe.

Dave