On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 05:33:46PM +1000, Russell Allen wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Back in the Jurassic period, somewhere around Squeak 3.7, there was something called
> “Package Universes” which I think was done by Lex Spoon, although my memory is a
> little hazy.
> 
> It attempted to simplify package management by reifying the concept of groups of
> packages which worked together - a ‘Universe’. Each Squeak image would then be
> within a Universe, and could be assured that packages wouldn’t conflict in that
> context.
> 
> The Package Universe browser isn’t in the latest Squeak, so I’m assuming that the
> approach was abandoned at some point in the last decade or so.
> 
> Did Lex or anyone do a post-mortem on why the Universes approach didn’t work for
> Squeak package management? 
> 
> I can’t immediately see what replaced it in the current Squeak, but I haven’t used
> Squeak for a while so don’t really know what I’m doing…
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Russell 
>

Hi Russell,

Information on Package Universes is https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3785 and
the complete code repository is at http://www.squeaksource.com/universes

Universes was created by Lex Spoon, and Damien Cassou was also a major
contributor. It was part of the Squeak image for many years, but we
decided to remove it in 2015 because it was not being maintained and
was no longer fully functional at that point. It should be possible to load
it in Squeak 5.3, but you should expect to need to resolve some problems.

In my opinion, Package Universes was (and still is) a well-conceived idea,
and it's too bad that it never really gained traction. If you manage to
do something good with it, please report back :-)

Dave