Towards a new package dependency model

Abstract : Smalltalk originally did not have a package manager. Each Smalltalk implementation defined its own with more or less functionalities. Since 2010, Monticello/Metacello[Hen09] one package manager is available for open-source Smalltalks. It allows one to load source code packages with their dependencies. This package manager does not have all features we can find in well-known package managers like those used for the Linux operating system. This paper tries to identify the missing features and proposes solution to reach a full-featured package manager. A part of this solution is to repre-sent packages and dependencies as first-class objects, leading to the definition of a new dependency model.