> > Ah, now we're slowly getting to the heart of the matter. 
> > Which is: What _kind_ of platform are we talking about?
> > If we take Linux for example, being an operating system
> > it doesn't make a lot of sense to ship it without file
> > system support, does it?
> 
> Well, define 'ship it' and 'file system support'.

Okay, let me try: 'file system support' in this context means something that
is perceived as critical for the majority of the users of the system.
Something they don't even think about, something they take for granted.
Something where improvements (such as a journaling file system) are
perceived as important enough to justify breaking a few things here and
there in order to get it shaken down. BTW, I don't consider media stuff to
be the only place in Squeak where that's the case - most people do take a
working ClassBuilder, a set of consistent protocols, reliable network
support for granted. So do I. But I also think that there are other things
which - at the moment - are quite ... underrepresented.

'ship it' means what is it that people get by default. If you go to _any_
major Linux distribution you won't find one that doesn't support file
systems, that doesn't support kernel threads, that doesn't support virtual
memory management. Even though all of these are "optional", even though one
can (and some people do) build systems without it, these things are taken
for granted and trying to get a "Linux" to people where these things have to
be downloaded and installed first just won't get you very far.

Which makes me think ... perhaps I'm really fighting for the name more than
the content. I want the name "Squeak" be associated with a playful media
environment, not with a "development architecture". 

And that of course makes me wonder if that fight hasn't been lost way back
when the wording at Squeak.org changed from
(http://www.squeak.org/about/headed-99-98.html):

	"We believe that Squeak can be a first-class authoring environment
for active media, along the lines of Hypercard done right. We believe that
Squeak can be a system that one could approach as an arithmetic engine, a
string-processing engine, a graphics engine, or a music engine, and be able
to probe deeper and deeper in any area, emerging with a complete
understanding of these areas, enlightened by an understading of how they are
all the same, and empowered with the ability to mold the system into any new
configuration that makes sense. We believe that Squeak can be as small as
any rival system, making it a great base for interesting PDA software, and
we believe that Squeak can be nearly as fast as any rival system, making it
a reasonable choice for even the most serious software development work."

to:

	"Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation
whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to
debug, analyze, and change. The image above was created in Squeak, and
illustrates several of Squeak's abilities, including the ability to scale
and rotate bitmap images at any colour depth, anti-aliased TrueType fonts
and vector graphics. " 

(see www.squeak.org today). What a difference :-( Somehow I'm still trying
to live by the "old dream" of Squeak but it seems that this is no longer the
goal for the driving forces in this community. Sigh...

Sadly,
  - Andreas