Em 28-06-2009 19:31, Bernhard Pieber escreveu:

(...)

I don't agree at all that that was a wise move. I think Squeak lost a lot of existing and potential contributors by saying: "If you want your code to continue to work in Squeak, you have to constantly adapt to our changes." I think that is what Stéphane Rollandin was trying to tell us. I am convinced that the separation of the base and the full image and the concentration on the base instead of the full image was the reason why forks were inevitable. Starting refactoring was necessary and a very important service for the community, but it had to have been done in the full image! My argument is basically that of Wolfgang Eder from July 2006:
http://www.nabble.com/Proposal-for-a-Squeak-migration-meeting-ts4867570i120.html#a5260913

That is still a very relevant thread today, by the way.

Agreed

Isn't that made clear to anyone these days: a days of bloated images
which includes everything and where everything is working is passed.

Obviously, it is not clear to me. ;-) Seriously, I have thought a lot about it and I am convinced that the kitchen sink image was Squeak's main attraction. The moment we lost it we started losing contributors.

Agreed. No meaning reinventing the wheel over and over... BTW re-usability was one of the first goals of OOP...

Because there are people who need to deploy stuff on server (to run
Seaside or Wiki, or other services), and if you put bloated stuff
there, and try to scale, the people around will start asking, why it
consumes so much resources?

Note, that I am not saying that the kitchen sink image could or should not be put together from a small image and nicely modularized packages. What I am saying is that if you clean up only the base image you will never be able to put together the full image because I guess many of the maintainers will not bother to repair stuff others broke. Worse yet, they probably will not bother anymore to create more cool stuff.

Agreed.

Earlier someone wrote a nice list of packages that aren't working anymore... many of these packages weren't replaced. Worse: many packages appear in Universes (for instance) but cannot be loaded (example: try to load Monticello 1.6 and you'll have an infinite loop while trying to load Monticello 1.5. Then you may ask: what you want Monticello 1.6 for? Like for installing Balloon3D from Universes ??? But then B3D is broken too...at least in Scheduler...).

And it brings back the lack of professional support. Someone could argue that Alice isn't necessary anymore because we have Scratch. Fine. But how to use Scratch for basic school students if it comes in English and Squeak just doesn't have anything like i18n... Well, Scratch is a fork... and it goes forever... so people give up and use Java Alice.

See, I can follow your reasoning. And it sounds very convincing. Therefore, I am not blaming anyone for going that route. I am totally sure everyone had only the best intentions. Nevertheless I am totally convinced it was a really bad idea and it still is, because that way you lose contributions and contributors.

Cheers,

Bernhard
  

CdAB