[squeak-dev] Package Universes?

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Thu Apr 30 23:57:51 UTC 2020


On Fri, May 01, 2020 at 09:37:00AM +1000, Russell Allen wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 05:33:46PM +1000, Russell Allen wrote: > 
> > > 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??? 
> > 
> > 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 
> 
> Thanks guys for the responses.
> 
> The Universes code from SqueakSource loads into a 5.3 image fairly well, with only some deprecated morphic methods to handle. 
> 
> Of course the Universe server is long gone, so I haven???t tested it yet.
> 
> It seems as if the core concept and code is very simple, any complexity really comes from the way in which the package universe code defines its own server (with a basic concept of security and permissions) and interactions with that server. It seems to me that a rewrite could separate the making and publishing of universes out into separate tools and end up with a very lightweight system.
> 
> Reading through the resources, my conclusion is that it should be considered in the same category as apt for Debian or homebrew for MacOS, rather than hackage or npm - that is, it is a tool for managing multiple ???applications??? in an image you live in rather than a tool for a developer assembling components to be compiled into  single application/image to be used as a deliverable or app server.
> 
> Cheers Russell
>

I think that your conclusions are right on target. Debian package management
is a good analogy.

Dave
 


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