23 Aug 2007 17:39:48 -0400, Lex Spoon lex@lexspoon.org:
"Ralph Johnson" johnson@cs.uiuc.edu writes:
On 17 Aug 2007 17:33:15 -0400, Lex Spoon lex@lexspoon.org wrote:
Anyway, I plan to add a link to the SqueakMap entry. SqueakMap seems like a more appropriate place to add all the bits of meta-data you might ever want, including authorship and time stamps.
Would it be possible to use the SqueakMap entry as a pointer to the source? Some package maintainers have stopped updating their SM entry and just use PU. This is a shame, since SM is the nearest thing we have to a catalog of the entire Squeak universe. But I can see that people don't want to keep two systems in synch. If PU could refer to the SM entry then perhaps they could just update their SM entry and get the PU entry updated for free.
I would like there to be an easy way to post to both indexes in addition to others. That's why I emailed the SqueakSource maintainer with code that posts a release to a package universe, in the same way SqueakSource used to do this to SqueakMap.
Exactly whom did you mail this code? Neither Adrian nor Lukas nor me did receive any mails.
I got no reply, and last I heard the SqueakMap button didn't work any longer.
It doesn't work because HTTPSocket is broken a bit more than it was before.
Cheers Philippe
Bummer. The code is on the wiki, for people interested in setting up a "post update" code snippet for their own personal use.
For your concrete suggestion, I do not see how it would help. You still have to explicitly post to two services, only now instead of posting a simple URL to the package universe -- the same URL you'd paste to SqueakMap -- you'd post a SqueakMap version number. Isn't it just as easy to paste the URL into both tools?
Anyway, there is a better way to get SqueakMap holding more content: have it pull package versions from popular package universes. At one swoop this would make SqueakMap hold strictly more content than package universes. Plus, the presense of a package in particular package universes could cause the SqueakMap version to have tags added.
- Packages should have information such as purpose and maintainer. At the moment there seems to be no such information. Instead it is
repeated for every version of the package.
The maintainer and description can and do change asn time goes on, so it seems better to relist them for each version.
But people tend to not bother copying the description, so it can be hard to find.
That should not be an issue in practice. Can you point me to a package where this happened?
Maybe the UI needs improving, but there is already a "new package version" button in the universe editor. If you use it, the tool will automatically copy forward all the fields from the previous release of the package.
Most of the time, anyway, you are only interested in the most recent version of a package.
One thing that is annoying about PU is all the old versions. I wish maintainers would delete the old versions when they put in the new.
Well, whenever you release 3.10, it will get cleaned out in the process of releasing the 3.10 stable universe. :)
I am not sure it is a worthwhile expendature of time for individual contributors to delete old versions. They can do so, if they like, however. The only potential problem is the one mentioned by the Viking, that users sometimes *want* to use an old version. So if it is really a problem, I believe it would be more helpful to have a weekly cleaner script that removes all but the most recent two versions.
Given Damien's new UI, though, it seems like less of an issue nowadays.
Thanks for the comments everyone,
Lex Spoon