Paul McDonough <wnchips at home.com> wrote...
>What's needed is solid collaboration and coordination (via discussion
>and sharing) amongst SqC, SqF, StSq, and for that matter Camp Smalltalk
>and a host of other Squeak/Smalltalk oriented projects.

I agree.  What made me write was a feeling that this wasn't happening.  Two examples are:

	1.  A separate mailing list got formed for SqF, and people 
	who need to be a part of the SqF process aren't following it.
	In particular the StSq work as a potential base for future
	mainline Squeak releases is mentioned.

	2.  It feels as though there's a desire to put out StSq 2.8
	as a thing unto itself, rather than as a testbed for a 
	reformulation of the next Squeak release.

>Alliance can be so-o-o-o much more powerful than union, sometimes.

I can see how this may be powerful in some sense.  But if that becomes the focus, then I can imagine energy flowing into StSq2.8 as a fork rather than Sq3.2 (or whatever) as a join.  And also it would feel like more of an alliance if there were an occasional message from the StSq folks along the lines of "we just got the font swap (say) done, and it looks easy to recreate in 3.1 whenever the time is right".   Instead, almost the first report is about "unleashing StSq 2.8".

The SqF has also been remiss in this regard.  Hopefully it will soon be more proactive and propose/declare its role in the community.

>An attempt to
>unify SqC, SqF, and StSq under a single structure would however, imho,
>be a serious mistake.  The blue plane and the pink plane must each fly
>free, albeit cognizant of the other.  More prosaically, each of the 2~n
>'threads' can benefit greatly by reaping the efforts of the others, and
>yet more prosaically who in the world would want to take on the sheer
>managerial task of driving them all.

I'm split on this topic.  From the inside it looks this way, but at this point, we have few resources, few funding sources, and not exactly a dominating position in the world.  So I see a need for a coherent focus if we want to become a going concern.  I sure wouldn't want to try "driving" the thing, but it may be worth trying to coordinate things better than we have done so far.

></uninvited soapboxing>

Well, I invited it.  We're talking now ;-).

	- Dan