[Morphic] Some challenges for the morphic team

Wed May 17 13:26:05 UTC 2006

> I'm a bit disappointed that after some initial interest, nobody  
> seems to be interested in my objectives for Morphic anymore. I want  
> to simplify, clean and remove stuff. But nobody except for me sent  
> any contribution in that direction. (Except for Edgar. He did send  
> some stuff, that I rejected). And somehow recently, additional  
> 'Diego's look' stuff got in. And I see people believing that for  
> Squeak to be 'serious' or something, we need native widgets or  
> migrate to wxWidgets or such. So my ideas don't seem popular anymore.

I think that if you have a vision keeps it and continue. If you  
improve something we will incorporate it.
I would love to help. Now my time is so short that I cannot even  
program.

> I also believe that we are having serious problems in setting the  
> direction for Squeak.
> Even though we all agree we want a small basic image with optional  
> stuff in SqueakMap, every release gets bigger and bigger.

But where are the cool shrinkers? Where is the code that I can  
unload. Did you have a look at the scriptloader?
There is a category of methods for checking which package can unload  
(just unload not even cleanly). So do you
think that if you provide some repakaging we will ignore it? No so what?

> The community has people with very different interests and it's not  
> easy to satisfy all of them. And we are failing at setting teams  
> for these different areas, with the objective of REMOVING their  
> stuff from the basic distribution, to manage it outside the image.  
> People seem to think that if something is taken off the image it  
> won't be maintained anymore.

I do not know. What I see is that lot of packages are not maintained.  
Network fixes seem to be lost. May be network is not interesting  
after all.

> I think this is not true. A package is maintained if and only if  
> some guys with enough knowledge and interest take care of it, be it  
> in the image or in SqueakMap.

Exact.

> WRT the development tools and ToolBuilder, I always thought that  
> the migration of the Morphic tools to ToolBuilder is a task for  
> ToolBuilder guys, and these tools shouldn't be anymore in a Morphic  
> package or under the responsibility of Morphic people. Wasn't this  
> the idea?

I do not know. I spent some nights with Cees to make sure that at  
least we could load the ToolsPlus in the hope that
we could subsitute the old tools but this was not the case. So we  
will remove them from the image. Still we lost a lot of time.
But we tried!

> Perhaps the Morphic Stewards Team needs new people, more in line  
> with what the community wants.

You are the community so what do you expect. Three guys having fun is  
enough.

> What I'm feeling inclined to do is to focus on my Morphic cleaning  
> in my 3.7 image where it all began.

I think that doing that will be an error. But this is your time and  
energy.
I think that I will harvest then the fixes and changes that have been  
sent to morphic.

> Perhaps it could evolve into a Squeak Distribution for programmers,  
> or something like that. the only thing I will really miss is Traits.
Are you joking?
Have you see the number of fixes and enh we harvested. This is not  
only traits that you will not get.

This is exactly with this kind of behavior that nothing in the long  
run will happen. That we see a lot of people creating their own  
images but not really making sure that others can use it. I said  
several times to Pavel and others that if what they do is reasonable  
for 3.9 (small steps) then we would integrate that. With this  
reasoning Diego, Traits, Unicode....would still be in
several different images. We spent a ****lot**** of times to make  
sure that what people did is integrated. People
were willing to spend time improving Squeak.

> But I'm sure I'll be able to load it when it is mature enough for  
> everyday use (I'm thinking basically of programmer's tools). Or  
> perhaps my version of Morphic is considered for loading in the  
> official version sometime. Or even better, we have a really small  
> basic image with no Morphic on it, and mine is one of the  
> alternatives in SqueakMap.

Why don't you work on 3.9 I really do not get it.
Do not make the mistake of the ToolsPlus, all that good energy was lost.
I would like to get some energy to migrate all the tools to use  
ToolsBuilder but right now I spend my days fighting, my evening  
painting and the rest writing articles and teaching.

Ok so if the morphic team is dead, I suggest that we close it and  
mark it dormant
because there is nothing more counter productive than to give the  
impression that there is activity while
nothing happen.

Stef

>
> Cheers,
> Juan
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "stephane ducasse"  
> <stephane.ducasse at free.fr>
> To: <morphic at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2006 3:46 PM
> Subject: [Morphic] Some challenges for the morphic team
>
>
>> Hi guys
>>
>> - could you have a look at the pending fixes for 3.9b?
>> - then I was thinking that I would like to do the following:
>> Remove ToolPlus from the image
>> Start to convert systematically the Tools to use the ToolBuilder  
>> abstraction.
>>
>> would you be interested in this effort?
>>
>> Stef
>> _______________________________________________
>> Morphic mailing list
>> Morphic at lists.squeakfoundation.org
>> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/morphic
>>
>>
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