Hi all!

There has been something tasty cooking off-list in the Squeak community
the last few days and it fell upon me to present it to the community at
large. Which I do gladly. :)

NOTE: The following is my perception, if there is anything wrong here -
the appropriate people will surely slap me and correct it. :)

----

As most of you know we just entered 3.7beta and IMHO it looks pretty
good. The 3.7 release will not be far away and at that time we typically
open up 3.8alpha. So if there are any Cool Things going on that might
affect the plan for the upcoming 3.8 and beyond, the timing was "just
right" to bring it to the table...

And a Cool Thing just happened to drop in! Dan Ingalls has been testing
the waters for getting the support of the community in spearheading an
effort for Squeak version 4.0 *including a full 64-bit port* to the IA64
("Itanium").

Yup, you heard it right - with the help of Dan we are entering the land
of terabyte images. :)

And after exchanging a few emails we Guides of course decided to turn
him down, we don't need no stinking 64 bi... eh, NOT! ;)

The following is a short description of a battle plan for 3.8/4.0 that
Dan brought forward and that we Guides support (well, I haven't heard
anyone against):

- Dan will be doing the 64-bit port as part of Alan's group at HP. That
group also includes a bunch of Squeak heroes.
- Since a 64-bit port inevitably brings us an image format change this
will be version 4.0.
- Of course this will also include most of the pending image format
changes that have been talked about for 4.0.

There are also (at least) two other important new things banging on the
Squeak front door:

- Yoshiki's m17n work
- Anthony's work with full closures

The idea here is a rather aggressive parallell schedule in which the
current community process continues with 3.8alpha/beta/gamma "business
as usual" and we bring in m17n etc, and at the same time the V4 team
with Dan in the lead prepares a migration process that at the end of the
release cycle can be executed fairly simply to produce the 4.0 version
from the 3.8 version.

This would then lead us to a simultaneous release of 3.8 (the last of
version 3) and 4.0 (which should be identical in all but the
image-format related areas) somewhere in june/july I think.

Just as an icing on the cake Craig Latta is also getting anxious to get
a part of the action and expressed his intent to try to get the Squat
work ready for production in time with 4.0 which could mean that a 4.0k
(kernel) might also be released at the same time!

This was intended as a "short" announcement but turned lengthy. Dan will
probably post shortly with more specifics, and I think Craig too etc.
Anyone in the community that wants to participate more actively in these
projects should of course not hesitate to contact Dan, Craig or any of
us Guides.

Phew. It looks like a busy spring, doesn't it? But FUN! Hmmm, Itanium...
well, how hard can an Opteron port be after that, eh?

regards, Göran

PS. Note how I managed to write this posting without any cheezy jokes
about "The Return of The King" or "The Return of The Jedi" or... eh,
darn.