Unofficial status report

goran.krampe at bluefish.se goran.krampe at bluefish.se
Fri Apr 1 13:57:05 UTC 2005


Hi everyone!

This *unofficial* report is just to keep everyone a bit updated.
Unofficial means that this report is written by me personally and the
other Coordinators (Doug, Marcus, Cees) haven't read it and may disagree
:).

Things in this report:

1. Squeak 3.8 Real Soon Now. :)
2. Teams churning.
3. The planning of 3.9 and beyond.
4. New VMs! 64 bits here we come!


Squeak 3.8
-------------
The release has now slipped a whole month, but hey :), Michael Rueger
will hopefully soon get it out. AFAIK it is ready to go and only some
image last-minute-preparation is left to do. Michael? Stressed out? ;)

Teams
-------
We now have a bunch of Teams working on separate tasks (see
http://anakin.bluefish.se/castaways/6) , and the team model seems quite
promising so far. The teams all have their own mailinglists so a lot of
that traffic has left squeak-dev - so don't be fooled and think things
aren't moving along.

The following is my personal possibly incorrect :) perception of what is
happening in the Teams at the moment (feel free to correct me guys). I
am not following all teams, but have skimmed the mls of those I don't
follow:

	- WebSite (9 subscried to ml). This team has set up a Smallwiki for
collaboration on box1 and seems to be starting to itch to get the new
website deployed, but I have not yet seen the current version (I think
it is temporarily offline). Looking forward to it though!

	- MorphicSplitters (15 subscribed to ml). Seems to be lots of activity
by looking at the ml acrhive. This team is also quite busy exploring
tools for doing analysis, including Dan's code and Daniel Vainsenchers
MudPie. Juan Vuletich seems to be the main heavylifter at the moment and
wow, I look forward to see what comes out of this team!

	- ToolBuilder (32 subscribed to ml). This project started out with a
bang, but the ml has been mostly silent during march. I don't think that
means anything in particular but I personally look forward to get
ToolBuilder installed as a package in Basic in the 3.9 alpha stream
ASAP, Brian, you hear me? :) The reasoning for that is to make the API
available for all of us so that we can start to program against it under
3.9 which in turn is important because in later releases (4.0 or 4.1 or
whatever) Morphic will turn into a package (MorphicSplitters) and then
tools that hasn't been ported to using ToolBuilder will become
inoperational without Morphic installed.

	- Packages (25 subscribed to ml). This is a team I am part of and we
have made some initial deicisons (for example to use PackageInfo as it
stands today) and also discussed and decided on a way on how SqueakMap
and Universes can be united/merged/whatever. For details on that, check
the archive. Avi has also created a page on the Swiki where Squeakers
can sign up if interested in helping with splitting out or maintaining
(or co-maintaining) a part of current Squeak Basic
(http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5641). Please people, go there and
sign up! The actual "doing it" hasn't begun yet, but I feel it will
soon. Avi? Whaddayasay, time to push some PIs into 3.9alpha? :)

	- Modules (51 subscribed to ml). This team is led by Dan Ingalls and is
focused on delivering a module system "for tomorrow". The team started
with a very good inventory of available technology and ideas
(http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5608) and is now moving over from
analysis to synthesis. :) It will be interesting to see what happens now
- IMHO there are a LOT of different aspects here, and to find common
ground can get real tricksy. But I have trust in Dan. ;) The inventory
in itself is a very good part way result and you can learn a lot just by
reading those.

	- Janitors (11 subscribed to ml). The janitors are doing us a great
service and with Ken at the helms I feel safe that the process of fixes
and bugs will gradually move to a better state. One of the things the
janitors are doing is that they catch all reports and fixes posted to
squeak-dev and move them over to Mantis. So people, remember, it is
Mantis we should use from now on. :) The team has also written a good
guide on how to report stuff in Mantis.

	- v 3.9 (9 subscribed to ml). Doug Way is the release leader for 3.9
and there is a plan for it on the Swiki
(http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5645). The work on 3.9 hasn't kicked
into gear just yet, but as the teams (Packages, ToolBuilder) get moving
and we get the Harvesting started again (Janitors, what are your
thoughts on that? Or Doug?) I think it will pick up. And with Doug
leading it I am not worried. :) Planned release is in june.

	- FileArea and Box1Administration are small teams and nothing much to
report. Box1 seems to be humming along fine and Bruce is doing a great
job as always keeping the file area up to date. If you haven't noticed
this is the current place to find Squeak:
		http://box1.squeakfoundation.org/files/
	...and if you want to mirror it, read:
		http://box1.squeakfoundation.org/files/MIRRORING.txt	

In my opinion all teams seem to be doing quite good. The archives of the
mls are available here: http://discuss.squeakfoundation.org

I don't think we need more teams at the moment - enough work going on to
keep us all busy - but if there are new teams brewing out there, then
feel free to contact us Coordinators and see if we can form an official
team. I know of at least one such team idea that has been discussed.


3.9 and beyond
-----------------
The plan for 3.9 is mostly set and 3.9 will turn out as a more or less
classic Squeak release with the exception of the result from the
Packages team which makes it different from previous releases. But what
happens then? What about 4.0 or 4.1? As we described earlier the result
of MorphicSplitters was meant to go in *first thing* in the release
after 3.9. Since then the discussion about the new image format was
brought up - and given that discussion at least I am personally leaning
towards this plan:

	4.0 = Let's make a release more or less immediately after 3.9 which is
identical to 3.9 but with the new image format and related changes. It
seems like a logical move. Tim? Reasonable? How about max 1 month after
3.9, which would mean late july?

	4.1 = This will then be the release with the result from
MorphicSplitters and thus we are buying them a little bit more time. The
plan was to push that stuff in as the first thing and if we open the
alpha stream of 4.1 after release of 4.0 then that would mean... say 1st
august? What do the splitters say about that? Sounds doable?

At the moment I can't find the thread discussing this, so please correct
me if you think the above is wrong.


New VMs!
-----------
Those of you that track vm-dev (or read the announcement today on
squeak-dev :)) are aware of that Ian Piumarta has been working hard
lately.

First we got a fresh release of 3.7 with a fix for the annoying 2Gb bug
(manifesting as trouble loading ImageSegments (like SqueakMap for
example) on selected platforms) and some rearrangements in the source
tree that now includes a full generated default src thus removing the
need for manually setting up VMMaker if you just want to build a tagged
release directly from SVN. Very nice work Ian!

Then today - as you saw in his posting "64-bit VMs" - Ian posted that
the 64-bit stuff finally went into the trunk! Yiha. So there are now
64-bit goodness ready for download! Find it all here:

	http://squeak.hpl.hp.com/squeak64/dist3/

Hmmm, now I just have to find a 64-bit machine to use it on. And let's
just hope this isn't a 1st april joke. ;)

Over and out, Göran



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