Going to 3.7 beta (was: [UPDATES] 34 for Squeak3.7alpha)

Doug Way dway at mailcan.com
Tue Jan 20 01:07:04 UTC 2004


On Saturday, January 17, 2004, at 05:45 AM, Diego Gomez Deck wrote:

> I'd like to check the list of goals we agreed on 3.7 before going to
> beta (http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3491).
>
>> From my POV we still have to work on:
>
> - Fonts.  I remember you (Doug) said you were working on Accufonts and
> Bitstream. how this work is going?

I fixed some issues with Accufonts and posted an updated version last 
month.  There are still a couple of issues:

1. The widths of some punctuation characters is much greater than a 
variable width font would typically be, so it looks sort of funny.  
Boris Gaertner has written a handy tool for editing StrikeFonts which I 
could use to tweak the widths, but then there's also some sort of 
notice encoded in the font itself, and I'm not sure if using this font 
editor would lose this encoded information.

2. There's not a simple way that I know of to include a largish set of 
fonts in a changeset (to go in the update stream), so I was going to 
wait and just include them in the 3.7gamma candidate image itself.

If #1 was the only problem, I might just include them in the update 
stream and let people react to whether the widths are an issue or not, 
and then we could fix it (or not) before beta.  But because of #2 I 
won't be able to include them until the gamma image.  I could just 
include them as-is in 3.7gamma anyway and see how things go.  If the 
Bitstream fonts are also available, it might not be a big deal.

(Note to myself, I need to give my new version of Accufonts to the 
package maintainer on SqueakMap.  Hey, now that SM2 is there, I could 
be added as a co-maintainer, and we could also keep the previous 
version!)

I haven't done anything with the Bitstream fonts yet, I wanted to 
finish Accufonts first.  The Bitstream fonts are also affected by issue 
#2, so they'd go in with 3.7gamma too.

Anyway, I will investigate issue #1 a bit more, but either way I will 
plan on including Accufonts + Bitstream fonts in 3.7gamma.

I guess one other thing I could do is create a 3.7beta candidate image 
with the new fonts included, that people would have to download to try.

> - Move to 4.0 and not to 3.7.  The .changes files is huge! And, from 
> the
> marketing POV, we have enough new features (babel, new look, ttf fonts,
> etc) to consider a "new" version.

We could have the version after 3.7 be 4.0.  But I don't think we 
should rename the current 3.7 to 4.0... IMHO we should decide at the 
beginning of the alpha stage what the version number for the release 
will be and stick with that.

It is true that the .changes file is getting big, so we may want to 
have 4.0 come after 3.7 even if we don't end up doing major changes 
requiring an image format change.

> - What happened with m17n inclusion?  One of the goals is to make 3.7
> (or 4 ;)) full translatable.

Yoshiki replied here... it looks like it will wait until the next 
alpha. (3.7/4.0)  It probably makes sense for this big change to go in 
at the beginning of an alpha cycle so it has a lot of time to "settle 
down".  The alternative is to put it in 3.7alpha ASAP and postpone the 
3.7 release a while.

> - I'd like to include the (just finished) Small-Land Project Repository
> (a type of new superswiki) to the 3.7.  You can see the web frontend to
> the repository in http://repository.small-land.org:8080/.  It's really
> simple to add, just a new class is needed (a type of ServerDirectory)
> and a registry on the servers list.  I'll post a changeset today.

Hm, if this is a generally useful way to load projects from the net 
(moreso than superswiki), perhaps it should be included.  It is a small 
addition.  I'd like to see some more feedback.  Do you think it should 
go in Basic or just in Full?

- Doug




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