Hi andreas

> I am totally aware about these effects. However, unless we want to play
> russian roulette we better think twice about whether a slowdown of the
> evolution in certain areas like compiler or VM isn't advantageous to 
> risking
> the viability of Squeak as a system.

I totally agree with you. Now here are some points to consider:

- the compiler and VM are not changing that often have you some data?
(at least from my perspective), even if marcus will push the compiler of
anthony with no full blockclosures.

- if knowledgeable people do not have the time to review then we are in 
the
situation where nothing will really happen. So the dilemna is having a 
system that
does not improve that much but is stable or a system that changes with 
the
risk that some stuff may break.

So I think that we should write more tests and this is the 
responsibility of the community
as a whole and run them regularly. I asked if someone could set up a 
test servers but
got no reaction. Then we should leave with the fact that something can 
break
even if I would really prefer a perfect running system.

I have a question about the code of the VM. Dan and recently nathanael
told me that the VM code was degrading. I imagine that dan also fixed a 
lot
of the problems with the port in 64 bits. But nathanael told me that 
there
was stuff defined in different places (I do not remember quite precisely
  but this is not crucial for my question). Is there a discussion 
between the
VMs maintainers to sit down and clean a bit or this is more incremental
as nobody as time? Because this would be a good way to have another 
step in
QA: having some time where stuff get cleaned. I think that this is what 
we are doing
(too slowly with the kernel but we also do not have that much time) and 
you
with Tweak as a massive/ultime clean of Morphic :).

Stef