[IMPORTANT] Concrete proposals!

Richard A. O'Keefe ok at cs.otago.ac.nz
Mon May 12 22:40:54 UTC 2003


As an onlooker and occasional contributor of small pieces of code,
I first want to express my thanks to and appreciation of all the
SqC and Harvester and Guide people.  And HATS OFF to the KCP and
MCP people; after years of being told that Morphic needed cleaning
up, to see it actually *happening* is wonderful.

As someone who teaches software engineering, I want to say that a
process is a means to an end.  The end is delivering useful (not
necessarily perfect) software in time enough to be useful, where
the social context determines what's good enough quality and what's
soon enough.

The thing is that a heavyweight process can slow you down WITHOUT
improving quality.

All the argy-bargy and pointing to mission statements and so on in
this thread is scaring me.  Previously, it seemed as though the only
barrier to rapid development of Squeak was a shortage of Harvesters.
Now I get the impression that before contributing anything I'll have
to read a hundred web pages, master a lot of terminology, jump through
a couple of tetrahedral hoops, and so on.

Do we _want_ potential contributors scared off like this?

It looked as though 3.6 was coming along about as fast as could be
hoped.  MCP, KCP, SM 1.1, &c are chugging along.

Before going overboard with processes, DO WE REALLY HAVE A PROBLEM?



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