Hi all!

"Andreas Raab" <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> > > What I feel _really_ unhappy about is the complete absence 
> > > of any vision (and action) which goes beyound "hack it up in
> > > small bits".

Well, I have a vision. But the Guides never promised the community a
Vision. We are trying to moderate, enable, coordinate. Not lead or
dictate. Yes, I agree - we more or less end up leading anyway - but it
still isn't the intention of The Guides.

We don't claim to know the Single Truth about what Squeak "should be".
And frankly - whichever Truth we would present there would be people
dropping out of the community because they don't agree with that single
truth.

> > Well, that *is* the strategy. One I'm all in favour of. 
> 
> You are confirming my worst fears.

Why? Personally the strategy is one that I am also much in favour of. If
you think it is a bad strategy then I would like to know why.
 
> > So if you ask me "what is the implicit strategic vision behind what
> > we're currently attempting to do", it is (ugly buzzword warning) to
> > redefine Squeak as a platform (an operating system done 
> > right) which is distributed, by default, as a rich personal
> > multimedia environment.
> 
> With not a single thought being put into the "rich personal multimedia
> environment" part? And you think that this will work (yeah, maybe for a year
> or two). You're going to end up as a competitor of any of the other
> scripting languages, just not a good one.

Now you are not being fair. Again - I think the most important role of
the Guides is to *enable* different directions to coexist. That is my
personal vision. To make Squeak - as a tool and as a community -
*scale*. Just like Debian does.

And if there are a lot of people in the community working out really
cool multimedia stuff then I am just the happier. 
 
> > The end result for 3.7 should be that the default download image
> > (kitchensink, in cdegrootspeak) from Squeak.org should look 
> > *exactly* as it looks now
> 
> Just my problem. It will look *exactly* the same for the next ten years if
> there isn't any vision about where to go.

Now you snipped the part where Cees added that he hoped it would include
a lot of new stuff - and you are also deliberately "misunderstanding
him" because you know - as well as we all do - that Cees was trying to
emphasize that the image will still be there, just like it is today.

It's just that it will not be as bloody messed up as you guys managed to
get it. (just couldn't resist)

> Ah, shoot. Why am I even writing this. The battle is lost anyways. There is

What battle? How do you mean lost? You aren't getting away that easily -
tell me exactly what your perceived problem is instead. Is it that we
don't all share the Golden Goal of Rich Multimedia? Or is it that you
don't think we are doing the Guiding part good enough?

> simply nothing I can do convince the guides that the media (and many other)
> stuff is as important as any of the other activities. At least it is now

Come on. We know that. But hey - why don't you just sign up as a
Harvester and *help out* then?
The thing we *do know* is that we simply need to get better
infrastructure before we selfimplode. 

So yes, I personally think SM is more important right now than TrueType.
Why? Because it is the enabler to get all those hundreds of talented
developers engaged in the process again making 10 other TrueType
packages to pick from!

SM is so damn simple. But still you didn't bother to build it did you?
It's about *enabling distributed development*. Enabling people to
maintain a piece of it all. It is a powerful and important thing.

As far as I remember you didn't take one single step in this direction
when you were steering the boat.

> clear to me that the original vision of Squeak is really dead today. "Thank
> you" for making this so utterly obvious.

It's not dead. Squeak has just gotten a whole bunch of other stuff going
too.
 
> Bye,
>   - Andreas

This whole discussion is disturbing me. I thought we were doing "ok" -
sure, the Guides aren't saving the world. We are just 6 of you guys. We
try to do the right thing and we try to listen and moderate discussions
- boil stuff down to decisions etc. Obviously Andreas think we are a
complete failure - he wants us to have a Grand Vision. He wants us to
lead the charge into the Future.

I don't know what to say. Perhaps we are failing and if all of you think
that then hey - speak up! I don't want to put a lot of work into stuff
that the community don't want... In that case I have better things to
do.

thoughtful, Göran