Hi folks!
On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 06:01:44AM +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.
Yes, you are confused. SqueakMap is a catalogue of available stuff that may or may not be appropriate for the image you are running. Universes define collections of stuff from SqueakMap (and elsewhere) that will probably work with the image you are running. These are completely different goals, and the two are complementary.
Portraying SqueakMap and Universes as competitors is very unhelpful. It is likely to discourage much-needed improvements to SqueakMap, and it comes across (at least to me) as unappreciative of the work of the people who have developed and supported it.
Dave
I am at large staying out of this discussion I think, but a few comments:
- Yes, they are different and should be complementary as they stand today. - Yes, they also do overlap in many ways and could possibly be merged into a single system, this has by the way been proposed by me and Brian Rice at at least one point. - I have had very little time moving SM forward and have also repeatedly tried to round up interest in helping out on that "new SM" (not much luck there though). - I *personally* have some slight doubts about maintaining multiple universes. I think most package maintainers have just energy enough to maintain their package in ONE place, not multiple. I don't have a good answer to that problem other than that if I had endless time to spend I would make a new SM3 that "does Universes too" and thus could theoretically replace both SM and Universes. But I don't have that time. :)
regards, Göran