Hi folks. First of all, sorry for the long email (I guess it will be long). After thinking and discussing hundred of times in the mailing lists, last week we all meet and talk about Metacello and Pharo. Dale, Stef, Marcus, Esteban, all were present. I want to write down all the ideas and solution in order to: not to forget them; and to get feedback and opinions from you. *Problems we want to face: * 1) Right now a user CANNOT know which version of a project is the stable for a specific Pharo version. For example, suppose ConfigurationOfXXX. The user cannot know that XXX 3.45 is the stable for 1.0 and that XXX 5.7.3 is the one for 1.1....etc...so users end up confused not knowing which version to download. In addition, #latestVersion is not enough, because that will answer you the latest version, but that may not be the correct one for older Pharo images. Suppose in the previous case, latestVersion may answer 5.7.3 which may not work in Pharo 1.0..... We want the user to be able to autaticallly load the stable version for each pharo version without needing to know that. 2) Have a repository for each Pharo version so that someone can easily browse the available configurations for that Pharo version, and load them. Not only one as it is now woth MetacelloRepository. 3) Be self contained. Sometimes developers removed packages of versions from their repositories. In such case, Metacello cannot do anything and the load may not work anymore. We want to be able to reproduce the load and be able to load the same 10 years after. *Solution proposed: * The proposed solution may not even involve Metacello. You may have heard about Metacello Project Loader developer by Esteban Lorenzano. See http://www.smallworks.com.ar/en/community/GoferProjectLoader The idea is rename that project to that it is a general name like GoferProjectManager or something like that, because now it will do load but also write :) I will call it GoferProjectManager in this email. The idea is that every developer of a configuration define the stable version for each Dialect version. There are two possible alternatives: a) That each Conf class implements #stableVersion: spec, which could be something like: ConfigurationOfXXX >> stableVersion: spec spec for: #Pharo1.0 do: [ ^ self version: '3.45' ]. spec for: #Pharo1.1 do: [ ^ self version: '5.7.3' ]. spec for: #Pharo1.2 do: [ self error: 'There is no stable version for Pharo 1.2' ]. spec for: #Gemstone do: [ ^ self version: '4.2' ]. ..... or something like that...the idea is that you define stable versions for each platform. The idea is that now the user could do something like this: ConfigurationOfXXX project stableVersion load but he won't do that ;) b) another approach is to specify something in each version, for example: ConfigurationOfXXX >> version345: spec <version: '3.45' imports: #('1.2-baseline')> spec for: #common do: [ spec blessing: #release. spec description: 'Blah balh...'. spec platformVersion: 'Pharo 1.0' and ConfigurationOfXXX >> version573: spec <version: '5.7.3' imports: #('1.2-baseline')> spec for: #common do: [ spec blessing: #release. spec description: 'Blah balh...'. spec platformVersion: 'Pharo 1.1' Now...any of those alternatives would solve problem 1) Now to solve 3) the idea is that GoferProjectManager could provide something like this: (Gofer project 'XXX') publishVersion: '3.45' for: 'Pharo 1.0' or then (Gofer project 'XXX') publishVersion: '5.7.3' for: 'Pharo 1.1' etc... Then this would do different things: a) Automatically take the conf class (it is important the name conventions!!) b) Commit it into the correct Pharo repository version. For example for 3.4.5 it will commit it in PharoMetacelloRepository10 and 5.7.3 to PharoMetacelloRepository11 c) Traverse all the dependencies of all needed packages and commit all of them to PharoPackagesContainer10 or PharoPackagesContainer11....etc Dale sent few weeks ago a script that does that: takes a conf, a version and a repo and commits all the files to that repo. With all this we solve 2). The idea is that for EACH pharo version we will have 2 repositories, one for the confs and another one for the packages (as a backup). The last point is that when loading we should load everything from the PharoPackagesContainer10 or PharoPackagesContainer11...but we don't want to change all our confs (for example, they are pointing to they own repos or MetacelloRepository)....so the solution is that we use GoferProjectManager to load. Example: Gofer project: 'XXX' loadStable and loadStable would be something like: self stableVersion repositoryOverrides: (self containerRepo); load The idea is that it can use #repositoriesOverride to override with the correct repository... So.....that's all. What do you think? does this make sense? Cheers Mariano