On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 07:24:13AM -0700, Overcomer Man wrote:
> 
> Along the way I noticed the .mcz files contained a lot of other junk besides
> Smalltalk code, and all the code for several FFI sub-projects is under the
> same filename inside the different packages.  Using .mcz instead of .zip
> is unnecessary complexity. The extra packaged files are not Smalltalk.  Why
> not just use Smalltalk?

Zip encoding is used for .mcz archive files for the same reason that
the Java folks use it for .jar files (and lots of other things). It
is a well-documented, widely understood mechanism for storing complex
files in an efficient manner. An additional benefit is that it permits
you to gain access to the contents of the mcz or jar file with any
available zip program on any operating system, which means that you
can poke around in the contents of the archive even you you do not have
access to Monticello tools (or Java tools, or whatever).

And of course Monticello itself does just use Smalltalk. The tools
are written in Smalltalk, including all of the zip encoding and
decoding, and the source code for all of this is in any image that
contains the Monticello tools. Some images do not have Monticello
installed, in which case ... well, it's not installed.

Dave