On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, ducasse wrote:

> Hi avi
>
> I hope that once we will have this discussion face to face in front of
> a beer.

Definitely.  Any time you're in Vancouver... ;)

> I tried monticello and I'm amazed (you know the feeling that a
> Smalltalker gets when seeing a C programmer discovering Java) that we
> are still there while this is 6 years that I worked daily with envy or
> store (which have their own problems too). So monticello is a good
> effort because else we would not have anything. Luaks showed me his
> cooool extensions you know where you have a list of projects
> sorted.....I'm not seeing that this is bad, this is good and needed when
> you have nothing.

Well, sure - ENVY and StORE are a lot further along.  Gemstone is further
along than Magma.  The VisualWorks VM is a lot faster than the Squeak VM.
And so on, and so on.  Nobody is claiming that everything we have in
Squeak is the best thing out there (with my typical humility, I
would claim that Seaside is one example where we *do* have the best ;).
But saying "ENVY is better than Monticello" doesn't get us anywhere;
understanding *why* it's better might.  So please, give me some
details here.

> Not everybody I guess. Why the changeset sorted then is still using
> changeset and remove? When I harvest I only get cs and not mcv. When I
> click on changeset sorter mail to the list I send a changeset. So this
> means that behind the scene the nice harvester would have to dispatch
> the changes to packages.  My point is that people should realise that
> having just a layer of packages does not scale for the harvesting
> process and maintenance of external packages. May be I'm wrong....

Why doesn't it scale?  If we decided to harvest based on packages instead
of changesets, we could do exactly that without too much trouble.  Daniel
and I have talked serveral times about setting exactly that up.  I think
it's a great direction to go.

> > Please, tell us why Monticello sucks instead.
>
> I'm not saying that.

You misunderstood me - I wasn't being sarcastic, but genuinely looking for
feedback.  Monticello *does* suck, or rather is incomplete.  What I want
is for you to try to use it and tell me which parts that are missing are
hurting your efforts the most, and should be addressed first.

> I'm just saying that there is a guy (not an easy one sure) that works
> over 15 years in envy, package.... management wrote books, works on big
> industrial projects that will release a meta-model for code and that I
> do not want to reinvent that. (because I already did that for my
> research and this is enough for me).

Stef, if you really want to have this argument, let's make it technical,
not personal.  We all know that Joseph is an experienced professional -
much more experienced than I am, for example.  We all know he does good
work.  But what is it that you actually want from Ginsu that you're not
getting elsewhere?  What, specifically, does the code we have available
for Ginsu do, that the code we have available for Monticello doesn't?

Again, I'm not asking rhetorically.  I genuinely want to know.

> But just because I have nothing else because after worked in good
> environment this is like having my hands cut.

Great.  Why?  What do you miss from StORE or ENVY?

Stef, forgive me if I seem to be coming on strong.  I know you won't be
offended by it...

Avi