On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 06:01 +0100, Jason Johnson wrote:
On 10/31/07, Chris Muller asqueaker@gmail.com wrote:
SqueakMap is a great Squeak legacy and allows stuff to be loaded into a clean image. Universes, to me, sounds a bit misguided, and far from making rendering SqueakMap obsolete.
I'm confused here. As far as I know:
SqueakMap is a tool that allows one to load a package into an image Universes is a tool that allows one to load a package into an image, but is more sophisticated (e.g. understands dependencies).
Please correct me if I'm wrong, because by that definition SqueakMap appears to be clearly obsolete from a technical point of view.
Note, I'm only speaking to your statement about Universes being misguided and not rendering SqueakMap obsolete. The nostalgia of SM and the purpose it serves as a record of anything ever done in Squeak are a separate concern.
I'm a user of universes but I cannot agree with the statement of squeakmap being obsolete. Squeakmap is a good tool to install packages. It has proven that it works for exactly that need. To say a tool which manages dependencies is more sophisticated is problematic in my opinion. At first dependencies introduce complexity which isn't always good. The upside of having dependencies has the downside to be hussled by dependencies. With dependencies it is easy to install software in first place. If I have my own set of module versions I don't want to have a tool which decides to install other versions than the ones I like. I know this can be prevented but it stays problematic.
I know the success story of such a system quite well. It is called debian. There you are forced to use dependencies (most of the time). In the debian world this is a good thing because a lot of work goes into the management of these dependencies and into the inter- operability of the packages which depend on each other. Please do not ignore this extra effort. In my opinion I don't have a problem with this system in debian because I know I can trust them.
Maybe there will be a time when universes split into more universes of stability (or other categories) where a lot of people have an eye on the interoperability and the dependencies. At this time having a browser which lets me override dependencies would be very good. I think at this time I would reconsider squeakmap being obsolete :)
At the end I learned something valuable from this list: Something is obsolete if nobody wants to use it anymore. And it doesn't seem to be the case right now.
Norbert