Hi Diego and all!

<diegogomezdeck at consultar.com> wrote:
> Hi guys...
> 
> The following is an email I'm thinking to write for weeks.
> 
> To say it shortly: Squeak is dieing in front of us...

I wouldn't say "dieing". But we are suffering a bit.
 
> Since SqC leaves the "dictatorship" role we don't find the way to
> continue.  Despite the apparent organization and procedures we had created,
> simply in the last months we was not able to satisfy the expectations.
> 
> To probe my point just take a look to the amount of fixes waiting for
> approval and the changes produced by MCP and KCP.

I am confident that we will soon start moving MCP and KCP work in
earnest into 3.6.

> Personally, I paused my work in MCP until something happens in our
> community.  I invest most of my free time in Squeak and I don't feel this
> sacrifice is producing results.
> 
> >From my point of view We're trying to organize so much, and in the reality
> we have pages and pages describing a process (the harvesting process) that
> don't work.  The bureaucracy is killing us.  The steps to get a fix
> approved are, in most of the cases, more difficult and time consumer than
> the fix itself.

Well, in this regard I am perhaps inclined to agree a bit. But I have
seen the current Harvesting solution as a temporary solution during
which we will establish a much simpler scheme. And personally I haven't
tried the process so it may be simpler than it sounds.

>  We have lists of people with roles (guides, harvesters,
> etc) but in the reality only a few of them are active and working.

The Guides are AFAICT quite active. Doug is active with updates,
harvesting etc. Daniel too. Craig is working on the Squat-project which
sounds encouraging and hopefully can be used as a base for future
minimal kernels. Tim is working on VMMaker and I am finally getting down
some real time on SM. Ned is doing a superb job answering questions on
the list.

The people listed as harvesters are unfortunately not that active -
myself included.

> We have big problems and I don't feel the community realize of it.

Well, I don't agree - many of us are aware but we also know that it
takes time to change things. But there are good things happening too -
just look at SM!

Let me give you my most personal reflection on the harvesting issue. I
firmly believe we suffer from:

1. A lack of good tools.
2. Too much "discipline" in the alpha phases.
3. Lack of packages.

Good tools are very important. I would be interested to look more
closely at Monticello for doing more interactive development. Another
issue we have IMHO is that we are "too careful" in the alpha phase. It
would be better if trusted developers could commit changes directly -
all other open source projects have this attribute (through typically
CVS).

Anyway, as we keep splitting up the image into packages the problem gets
distributed and much easier to handle.

But what we really need are Stewards for the base image packages. People
- take this as your chance to really be responsible for a piece of
Squeak. I will actually take a look in the image myself and see if I
can't find a piece of it that I could become a Steward for. And I urge
everyone else to do the same.

> Cheers,
> 
> Diego Gomez Deck
> 
> PS: I'm talking for my own and my thoughts are not the MCP-team opinions.

Cheers, Göran