Bruce ONeel <beoneel at mindspring.com> wrote privately to SqC...
>Hi,
>  While I was on vacation John McIntosh built a new Mac VM.  At the
>same time there seems to be a lot of activity on SourceForge with
>unixy VMs.  Up til now I've gotten the official (well, as official 
>as Squeak stuff gets) VMs from
>
>Dan or John Maloney - Mac
>Andreas - Windows
>Ian - Unixy
>
>as the major ones and then the minor ones get picked up from 
>who ever points me to them and seems to work on them.   Is this still 
>a good policy?  Or have others taken over VM building?  Because
>of 2.8 not being released in final form and because of the ferment
>in the VMs I've held off building the 2.8 packages for now, but, I also
>don't want to delay longer then necessary :-)

We've talked this over, and I think it merits an "official" answer from SqC...

The short answer is Yes;  things have worked well this way in the past, and we would like to see them continue this way until there is a compelling reason to change.

Now for the longer answer...

Mac
John Malone is eager to get out of the VM business (not the ability, just the responsibility), and John McIntosh is interested in taking over this role.  So it will still be "Dan and John M", but the M will stand for McIntosh.  I will continue simply because I am the official vector of the "all in Squeak" philosophy.  I consider it my responsibility to make sure that any good Squeaker with a minimum of C compiler know-how (this is me ;-) can build a VM.  Things appear to have gotten more complicated here in the last few months, and it's my hope to work with John Mc to bring it back to a very simple procedure.

Windows
Andreas -- no change here.

Unices
Ian has been tracking the Squeak releases from the beginning and has responded to bug reports and questions with peerless results.  As long as he is willing, I would like to continue with Ian as the official purveyor of unix VMs.

Recently there has been much of interest and activity surrounding the installation of unix VM sources on SourceForge.  This has the potential advantage of making those sources easily available to a number of people attempting to work together on changes to the VM.  It also has the potentially disastrous property that, if not undertaken in partnership with the official purveyor, it can lead to utter confusion over what VM has what features, bugs, etc.

Until now, I have stayed out of the SourceForge discussion because (1) I don't know a thing about unix development, and (2) it's in the spirit of open source development that anyone can do anything, and it's OK.  My opinion is this:  that it is critical to have a wizard in charge of each official release, and that a part of that work is the careful vetting of any changes being considered for inclusion.  If the SourceForge work is considered as a path to the production of official unix VMs, then Ian needs to be consulted as to whether this would fit with his process.  If it doesn't, then perhaps at least a paradigm could be proposed whereby the active users of SourceForge could most effectively synchronize their work with Ian's official releases, and could contribute valuable enhancements in a way that minimizes the effort required by Ian to adopt them.

This sounds like an admonishment, but I think the truth is that all the forces acting right now are benign.  I just want Ian to continue the official unix releases as long as he is willing, and I want to see the other good work on unix VMs get included carefully and appropriately as it has in the past.

2.8
Since it is mentioned as a factor, I expect to have the final version of 2.8 wrapped up some time this weekend.

	- Dan