Hi all!

I have been reading and frantically writing the first WEEKLY report and
I must say that the recent traffic on the list has been *quite
disheartening*. Now, Tim of course said one of the most sensible things
in all this:

"What is the problem here? Do I need to spend my limited time and money
to arrange a would tour to dopeslap some of you guys? Stop damn whining
and get on with having fun."

And I definitely agree. Let us STOP being so darn negative and get on
with shaping up Squeak.

Now... my take on all this is that it all boils down to people not
realizing some "truths" in our community:

- Squeak is a *diverse* community. Different people have different
*focus* and are good at different things. We just have to ACCEPT THAT.
Stop whining about "multimedia Squeak" or any other special direction
you happen to care about. Noone likes whiners. Get off your butt instead
and work in that direction.

- Most of us aren't working full time on this. Or rather almost noone
is. This means NOONE owes NOTHING to ANYONE. Ok?

- Development follows a simple rule: If there is a Squeaker interested
in something it gets worked at. Period. No, I said PERIOD.

Ok, so the conclusion is what? Simple. If there is noone working on say
"multimedia parts" of Squeak, then they will rot. It is *that simple*.
And it doesn't help ONE DAMN BIT for one Squeaker to tell another
Squeaker to "fix that". Noone owes anyone anything.

So frankly - if there are people wining about parts in Squeak being
neglected - WORK ON IT YOURSELF damnit! Or shut up.

Finally, there is NOONE here trying to make it harder for multimedia
Squeak. There is noone here that does NOT want "personal media" etc. We
all want it. Really. Stephane and the guys are doing THE BEST THEY CAN.
And so are everyone else involved here. There is NO NEED to throw
negativity around. Really. Let's HELP EACH OTHER instead. If it all
comes down to what packages are in Basic or Full then that is a SMALL
PROBLEM. 

So the overall challenge is this:

- How do we create a Squeak so that different directions can coexist
together? Avoiding forks?

Answer: Packages. Modularisation. And all that comes with it so that we
can maintain "distros" or "images" in parallell and so that we can rely
on the same base packages. This is standard obvious stuff people -
repeat after me - packages, packages. I mean, there are almost 500
packages on SM today! Does anyone in his right mind really think all
those could have been living happily together in a single damn image fed
by an update stream?! No of course not.

- And what happens when package X isn't being maintained properly and
someone is sad about it?

Answer: It bloody rots. But *so what*? If noone is prepared to maintain
it then obviously noone cares. Let it rot I say! Bah! :)

Now, everyone stop whining and get working on the stuff YOU care about.
Sound? Graphics? Balloon3D? Great! Perfect! Cleaning up Compiler?
Superb! Making the environment better? Yippi! Making SM the best coolest
thing since sliced bread (with dependencies)? Yes!

And in the end hopefully we can have a common small kernel image and add
packages on top of it to end up in our own favourite little place.

End of rant, over and out, Göran

PS. Remember - the alternative with a dying silent Squeak community is
much worse. Now we have a lively, but sure pretty confused and messy
community. But that is better than none. Now we all just need to learn
to cooperate a bit better and life will be good. :)