About a new roadmap for 3.9

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Tue Dec 14 13:47:21 UTC 2004


Hi all,

<WARNING>
Please before replying to this email ask yourself what you did recently 
for squeak besides sending emails!
And as you will see there are a lot of places where you can contribute.
</WARNING>

So after a long discussion with the crew here (nathanael, alex, marcus 
and adrian will agree)
we decided not to fork and this will cost us energy and time. But we 
think that this is worth.

We plan to do the following: we will focus on building 3.9 and take our 
time and your feedback to do it. We think that april/mai would be a 
good release date so that we have the time to test and work in pace.
(Note also that this will be my last contribution to the community 
(from today perspective since I do not
know where I will living in 5 months from now). So we want to have a 
really cool 3.9.)
BUT BUT BUT we will only focus on what we are good at and we NEED the 
help of other people to work on the
other areas: UI, Morph (PLM), Etoy,

Note that the list after is not fixed since we do not want to push 
something that will not be ready. For example,
we will pay an extreme attention that the traits are fully integrated. 
Nathanael is planning to help and also
would like to for example make sure that he can refactor the collection 
hierarchy before releasing traits.

We are LOOKING for a lead harvester, and ETOY harvester and a 
Multimedia one.

3.9 Full

	- new multimedia app (Ogg reader?)
	- YAXO (p) a real one on SqueakSource :) (yes this is a subliminal 
message :))
	- Wonderland back in shape (you see mark there are room) / 3DBalloon
	- and anything that is valuable for full
	- GENIE (yes ned we want that)
	- Connectors (yes yes we want that too)
	-> ned would it be possible to get access to one your recent Genie 
image?
	- but people will have to provide package in MC format (or at least a 
good sar)
	

3.9 Basic (the stuff for the developer: not the mini image! )
	- Diego look
	- eCompletion or another package (p)
	- keybinding cool package (may this one should go in basic as package 
(p) because the current way of binding
	key is system wide and not really good)
	- shout (p)
	- SqueakMap II (yes we want it)
	- rbengine (p) this is absolutely not intrusive (ok there are some 
duplicated functionality but we need it
	and if a brave soul wants to optimize it will be really possible for 
now we should not be that warry since the package is 	self-contained 
and we are not enough, so we should be productive and then after one 
guy will fix that if necessary). So 	simply a package that can be 
removed but that is needed to code.
	- services
	- new preferences pane
	- traits
	- new compiler framework (note that according to Scott this should not 
have an impact on etoy)
	But again we need a Etoy expert to help.
	- refactoring of systemDictionary as proposed to get it done once 
right. Again read again what we wrote and
	comment. (I think that having SmallltalkImage and SystemDictionary 
does not make sense to have both)
	- OB (p?) + browseUnit new version (integrated version). The idea of 
having OB here is that we want to enable
	the creation of new tools and deprecate slowly the use of the old 
browser (which could be packaged but keep
	alive in case we only want to have one single but gigantic class).
	- MC in the base image (we all would like to have a mini image and a 
cool script but for now
	not having MC in the base image is getting in our way to maintain 
packages and to also produce a much
	smaller mini-image, to also learn what we cannot do with MC and ask 
kindly to MC developers if they
	can fix the problems we see). Except if of course someone come up with 
a better idea and code
	to support that. We would like to avoid to abandon the idea of having 
packages in basic since we would like
	to push further the packages curving process.

	- We would like also to have a much better support for packages:
	Package as real entities with support for
		- resources
		- meta information
		- comments
		- substituing package info
	(alex is willing to work on that).

We also like the idea of TestServer, so feel free to write tests! May 
be markus G could be the guy responsible to
push them into the stream. Markus? Romain?

Note that for the packages marked as (p) of course we will ask if the 
package creator is willing to help
and feel the pression of having his cool package in Basic. One 
requirement could be that the code is managed
with MC and SqueakSource so that in case of emergency we can get our 
hands on it :)
We ask for feedback, help, testing, ideas....	

BUT MORE IMPORTANT:
This community needs to structure itself. We would like to be able to 
pay someone to work half-time on harvesting
and improving the system. So we are looking for solutions. Would you be 
ready to pay for a cool Squeak release?
Do not reply to this question now, just look at yourself in the mirror 
and let us hope that something happen.

Stef, alex, marcs, adrian and nathanael
(writing style of Stef ;)))

PS: marcus got totally burnt by the harvesting process and the lack of 
communication so now he should
reenergize himself. So don't expect anything from him, because he is 
learning to say no :)))

	




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