Re: [Help-smalltalk] brainstorming about gst-package and fetching remote packages

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 11/05/2009 11:32 AM, Gwenael Casaccio wrote:
> - first we need an easy way to get repositories (i.e. the list of
> packages)

I think there would be two parts to implement:

1) download a package given a URL (could be a http URL to a .star 
package, or a git/svn URL to a directory including a package file, or both?)

2) find a package's URL given its name.

For 1, support would be needed in the beginning for svn and git.

For 2, we could support a centralized repository at smalltalk.gnu.org 
(like rubygems.org) so the URLs could be standard: gst-package 
--download iliad -> gst-package --download 
http://smalltalk.gnu.org/project/iliad/repository.  The URLs could 
redirect to the "real" URL, e.g. from 
http://smalltalk.gnu.org/project/iliad/repository to 
git://github.com/NicolasPetton/iliad.git.

Do you think this would be too much of a hack?  Maybe it's better to 
return some XML thing from 
http://smalltalk.gnu.org/project/iliad/repository and parse it?

A third part would be to update packages on the fly from the remote 
repository (especially if it is a git or svn repository).

> - for each repositories do we support multiple protocols : ssh, git,
> svn, http(s), ftp, ...

That would be nice.

Paolo