Göran,

just one short note for now. You are completely missing the roots of the 
discussion and you are proposing a process which can't work. What you 
describe is a system without synchronization, a project without teamwork.

If there is a part of a project on which all other parts depend, and 
someone working on this part makes changes on it and communicates them 
SO THAT other parts of development are slowing down disproportionally, 
then overall efficiency decreases. Without proper communication it may 
even happen that part of the changes themselves are inferior.

To put this into the right view we have to think about the question: Who 
will use Squeak? and not: What do I personally like? or: What may this 
community like? Serving the biggest group will grow and therefore 
advance Squeak the most and at the end of the day benefit each of us the 
most.

For every current Squeaker with his or her very special interests, there 
are 100 times more ordinary application programmers and 1000 times more 
ordinary computer users. The very sad part of this is, that Squeak did 
not yet entered the terrain of the former.

These two groups of potential users, which dwarf by their sheer number 
of people the current Squeak community, have some difficulties with 
viewing Squeak as something really interesting.

For the application programmer who is using VisualBasic etc it is mainly 
the lack of:
- speed
- flexible and elegant GUI-library with a visual building facility
- small footprint of the image
- documentation

The normal computer user misses directly or indirectly the same things 
and additionally applications. Application programmer! Even more 
interesting to this group could be a whole new paradigm of software, 
something which is not only a clone of the M$ world, a niche in which 
Squeak could dramatically grow.

Back to the development process. These other parts under development I 
talked of, which are deemed to be slowed down disproportionally, are 
among the things that are interesting to the rest of the world. They are 
Squeak's biggest chance! Having that in mind the word disproportional 
seems to be moderate. We have some huge discrepancy here!

Given the importance of these other parts you can conclude that this 
story is not over yet, and I guess you know that. With stepping in the 
footsteps of someone pushing and shouting you will not solve this. I 
know you try to do the best and you surely thought about how to write 
this post, but your choice of this style seems to be totally wrong. The 
"communication attempt" of pushing and shouting has already done much 
harm to Squeak, the biggest part of it probably invisible.

Regards,
Martin

goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:
> 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. :)
> 
>