Hi all!

This discussion didn't turn out the way I wanted. I apologize to any and
everyone that I may have upset or insulted during it all. After getting
a few responses off-list (mostly encouraging) and also after having had
an interesting exhange with Andreas I feel like trying to do a "rewind"
on all this and try to start afresh.

Pretty suicidal - I know, but what the hell.

First of all:

- It was never my intention to "step on peoples' toes". I thought I made
it clear that I am talking about the future and how to improve the
quality of Squeak and not trying to point any fingers regarding the
current corpus of code. This is important. We all know the history etc,
there is no point in going there.

- Discussing this openly like this is a challenge. In the end I think it
should be the package maintainers of the standard packages that will
have to have the final word on any adopted policy. And I don't think we
would ever want to "run anyone over", so no reason to be afraid of that
if you are one of the standard package maintainers.

So... what the heck did I want? :)

*****
Well, I wanted to trigger a positive creative discussion about quality
improvement in the standard packages.
*****

Because I think we can do better. We can always do better. Right?

I probably did a mistake when I included my little example - everyone
started focusing on the example and whatever ideas I personally have on
this, even though I just whipped up the example in 10 seconds without
much thought. I also focused on code conventions - might have been a
tactically bad move. Duh. :)

Now, *forget* my ideas. I want to hear creative good ideas from you! How
do we improve the quality of the standard packages? Think broad now,
don't only think about code conventions or class comments.

I know for example Steph will rightly so push unit tests :) but before
you do that Steph - don't just say "We should all write tests!" :) Try
to come up with some idea, mechanism, tool or proposal that actually
would have a chance of *moving us* in that direction.

And remember - now that I rewound - anyone can of course participate in
the discussion, but I am *very* interested in the thoughts from the
"doers" here. The people currently maintaining standard packages that
is. Please interpret that in a wide sense please. No, I am not telling
everyone else they can't participate, and no - I don't mean "package
maintainers" as registered on SM - I mean you "doers" out there - people
with lots of code in the standard code corpus.

I am sincerely hoping you will voice your opinion.

Sidenote: Phew, hopefully this posting doesn't upset someone - perhaps I
should sprinkle it with some more smileys. Please, please - do not get
hung up on my words and instead focus on my question. :-) :-)

It might very well be that I have burned away any chances of getting
this thread going again, since it crashed and burned before. ;) Ok, here
goes: "send message", cross fingers, head for cover.

regards, Gšran

PS. Note that two IMHO good decisions have AFAIK been made following
this discussion:
1. The acknowledged practice of self approving of additions of *missing*
class comments.
2. The rule that we will strive to get class comments for ALL standard
classes.