Community and Artifact Define One Another

Stephen Pair spair at advantive.com
Thu May 31 21:15:25 UTC 2001


I was not attempting to rewrite history (indeed, attempts at rewriting
history really boil my blood...so please be careful when making such
accusations).

I guess it comes down to your interpretation of what exactly constitutes a
fork.  My definition of a fork is any line of development that occurs in
parallel to any other line of development.  When you download Squeak and
begin writing code, you have just forked.  (this very technical view of
forking is perhaps influenced by my experience in developing source code
management systems)

The real question is: "how often are the forks synchronized?"  If Je77 and
Bolot's answer to this question for ComSwiki was never, I would consider
that unfortunate.  However, ComSwiki does get syncronized periodically...and
the more often it is synchronized, the less work involved.

A nice service that someone could provide is to maintain a web page that
listed the major forks (lines of development) and for each fork, maintain a
"synchronization index" that was calculated based on the frequency that the
fork was updated to load and run correctly in the current Squeak release
(forks could also have SIs relative to other forks as well).  This
information would give people an idea of how current a particular line of
development stays and perhaps influence their decision whether or not to
follow it (of course, past results are not necessarily an indication of
future performance).

So, regardless of what the StSq people may say about forks, according to my
definition, they forked long ago.  And, I hope they sync up soon and often.

- Stephen

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andreas Kuckartz [mailto:a.kuckartz at dokom.net]
> Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2001 3:12 PM
> To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject: Re: Community and Artifact Define One Another
>
>
> Stephen Pair wrote:
>
> > I think people seem to forget that for a long time now, we've had a fork
> > that has quite successfully co-existed with the rest of the Squeak
> > community.  I think it has also been mutually beneficial.  It's called
> > ComSwiki and can be downloaded at:
> >
> > http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki
>
> Sorry, but this is wrong - please do not try to rewrite history to justify
> forks. For a long time now the up-to-date ComSwiki-sources have been made
> available by the authors and they could be filed in to an unforked image.
> Maybe the source is not (yet) available for the most recent version for
> whatever reason but that was not the case before.
>
> Andreas
>
> BTW: The StSq-people have made a decision that they do *not* want to be
> forkers and therefore all debates about forks have become much
> less relevant
> as far as I am concerned.
>
>





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