On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 07:52:29PM -0400, Bill Schwab wrote:
Colin,
Among many useful things in Dolphin is an ability to assign multiple categories to any given method; Squeak and Pharo allow only one category, and it promptly gets chewed up by PackageInfo. Multiple categories would be a nice addition to Squeak and Pharo.
How hard would it be to change Monticello to take its input not from PackageInfo and its (pardon me) abuse of category names, but from reifications of the categories? The new objects would form the basis for packaging system, and free method categories to do what they do best: aid in browsing and understanding code.
You could change PackageInfo to use the new scheme easily, I'm sure, or you could use Monticello2, which adds another abstraction layer atop PackageInfo (slices). And if Craig ever releases Spoon, we'll have another contender for version management (Naiad) PackageInfo is not that complicated. I was able to rewrite its image scanning code to be about 8x faster in about 40 lines of code, spread across 8 methods Making the browser nicely cope with whatever scheme you invent will be the real challenge. Can you give me an example of why you want one method in two packages? Monticello can handle that by using overrides, but it is a different version in each package. -- Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/