Paul Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> Does this sound like the beginnings of an approach that would produce a
> stable version of Squeak for commercial apps and utilities, with no
> money changing hands, and without posing a big threat to the beautiful
> thing that is the Squeak community? 
> 

A fork is likely to happen at some point.  However, several things on
your list are *not* going to be done soon by Squeak Central, but could
be done without forking:

	1. Making more standard widgits, including better layout widgits.

	2. Making a GUI builder based on them.

	3. Working out platform-issues with deployment.  It only needs to be
done once for each platform, and then everyone can benefit.  It's also
not an incredibly big task.

	4. Replacing the fonts.  Again not a big task--can someone download one
of these free fonts sometime and make a changeset that installs them? 
This issue is ridiculous!


Incidentally, image stripping doesn't necesasrily require any fancy
tools or system-wide rewrites.  All it really takes is people updating
the various remove* methods, plus occassionaly removing any dependencies
between "modules" that shouldn't be there.  The Linux kernel might be
used an as example here: it has well over 100 "modules", but the
dividing lines aren't on any sort of module system.  Each removable
module is just written carefully so that the kernel will still build
with any reasonable group of settings.  (Obviously, removing networking
and then trying to build TCP/IP support is not going to work very well).


Anyway, this is a wonderful post, Paul!  It really gets to the issues
without being silly.



-Lex