[squeak-dev] Community Supported Packages

Colin Putney cputney at wiresong.ca
Mon May 17 07:55:12 UTC 2010


Ok, this sounds like a good plan to me. I've been wrestling with the problem of how to distribute OmniBrowser. The base image should be getting smaller and simpler, and OB is too big and complex to be part of it. On the other hand, distributing OB as a SAR file isn't working out very well. Perhaps this will be a better mechanism.

To get things rolling, I've created a configuration for OmniBrowser and uploaded it to the inbox repository. I think OB probably meets the criteria for a community package:

	- It uses the prefix 'OB' for all class- and package-names to avoid name conflict
	- It doesn't override any methods in the base image or other packages
	- It has tests - not 100% coverage, but a lot of the important stuff is covered

If we come up with other criteria, I'll make sure that OmniBrowser continues to meet them.

I've structured the Configuration package with a superclass that includes the general Metacello bootstrapping code, and a ConfigurationOfOmniBrowser class to handle the specifics of this release. For the moment, I've included all the packages that OmniBrowser depends on, but ideally some of these should be factored out into separate configurations and made independently loadable - Kom, VBRegex, and perhaps the refactoring engine.

So, take a look, try it out, tell me what you think.

Colin


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list