Two small thoughts...
> Third, we have people who are experienced programmers who want to learn
> Squeak at what I'll call the 'system level'. Typically these people arrive
> on the list and have very specific questions about issues that are very
> closely related to programming the metal, such as how to control sockets and
> filestreams, different stack protocols, compiling the VM, etc. (As an aside,
> it seems to me that a lot of the questions have to do with how to do this or
> that under Linux. It's a shame that these technically savvy users are having
> such a hard time just getting Squeak to run properly on their machines, more
> or less actually program with Squeak. This is something that seriously needs
> to be addressed).
Sadly this problem is pretty endemic to anything to do with *nix and
especially linux. There are so many configurations to cope with that it
is amazing anything ever works. Even Mike Cowlishaw (probably one of the
smartest software people there has ever been) has pretty much given up
trying to get his software to work well on linux because of this. It's
no reflection on the people that are trying to help either; there are
just too many variables to cope with.

> 
> This is all rather strange. The base of the Squeak image has been documented
> in several ways, entire *books* have been written about it, from the
> original blue book to Guzdials new books. Yet people say that Squeak  is not
> documented, and other more trivial languages have 'extensive documentation'.
> Give me a break.
Remember that trivial systems can be extensively documented with rather
less actual material than something as extensive as Squeak. 

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Disclaimer:  Any errors in spelling, tact, or fact are transmission errors.