On Thursday, October 17, 2002, at 11:12 AM, goran.hultgren at bluefish.se 
wrote:

> And almost all of the above has nothing to do with classic CM problems
> which more or less focus on "how do we build a BIG system using 20
> developers". That is where Envy comes in. And Team/V - just listen to
> the name of the product.

For me, Squeak IS the BIG system where much more than 20 developers 
cooperate... For example to implement something like Modules...

Disclaimer: this does not mean that I am especially in favor for Ginsu, 
or for other things. But this statement is for me the exact motiviation 
for having modules in Squeak. My problem with the current module system 
was that I never was able to understand it, even not when looking at 
the code and the tests or spend a lot of time discussing with Henrik. 
This is not necessarily to say that the code is bad or anything, just 
that I am not able to get it. I am pretty sure that this is the reason 
that nobody really was able to take control of the code and move it 
forward. I agree with Daniel's mail in that respect where he challenges 
people to make this change to the modules.

So, to be constructive, what do I think that there is to do?

This is what I think:
1- make a paper/webpage/Swiki page explaining the model and the reasons 
for the decisions. I really like Goran for all the effort he is putting 
into this: it is needed to have someone to do this.
2- let people comment on the proposal.
3- Reimplement the model. Having looked at the code myself a couple of 
times, I think the current implementation is not the simplest that can 
be. It was a prototype and served very well as that. But a prototype is 
not meant to go in production/extensively used by people. So throw it 
away and built a new one taking into account everything that was 
learned building the first one. I cannot stress this enough: I like 
what Henrik did (since he built something that served as thinking and 
experimentation food), but it is now time to move this forward.

PS: Yes, I know, it is easy for me to say this because I am not going 
to do this. There is only so much hours one can spend working, and we 
spend a lot of time trying to come up with a module system for Squeak 
but we are not sure about the end result. We'll continue working on 
that in some form or another. But by having a paper
we were able to talk to a lot of people about it at Camp Smalltalk in 
Douai, and get valuable feedback. It would be great if we could do the 
same at OOPSLA.

PS: I am going to OOPSLA and I am willing to talk about this any time. 
I'll probably attend the Squeak BOF, where I guess this will be a 
discussion topic. That is, if emotions can be kept down and Henrich 
still wants to talk to me :-) I thought he knew Stephane's crude 
approach of expressing things better. But let's not dwell on that, I 
guess.

--
Roel Wuyts                                                   Software 
Composition Group
roel.wuyts at iam.unibe.ch                       University of Bern, 
Switzerland
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~wuyts/
Board Member of the European Smalltalk User Group: www.esug.org