Let us face reality

Cees de Groot cg at cdegroot.com
Thu Jan 27 17:19:25 UTC 2005


On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 16:43:15 +0100, stéphane ducasse  
<ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:

> You mean squeakpeople

No, I don't mean SqueakPeople. I mean the virtual server that's being paid  
for by donations from community members (thanks, all!) and that is  
therefore property of the community.

> This is your point of view.  And what I see as the net result is that  
> again nothing will happen since we cannot continue to rely and guys like  
> marcus or doug that got burned by the process. this is something
> different to have mailing-list running than going over the tons of fix  
> and evaluate them.
>
Not if two things happen:
- Packaging. Packaging. Packaging. Did I mention Packaging? You will never  
get enough manpower together to manage a monolithic image. Not unless you  
want to call yourself Java or something. I'm quite sure that as soon as  
the core is of a managable proportion, a lot of the backlog will vanish  
because the load will be distributed; if someone doesn't take up 'his'  
bugs, just kill them. If a package is not maintained and starts to exhibit  
bit rot problems, junk it.
- A good portal where new members, as someone else explained here, are  
presented with information about what constitutes good behavior; if more  
people get invited to the harvesting process, AND the scope decreases, we  
can go a long way towards making the maintenance manageable.
As I see it, money is *not* a good answer to complexity. Money usually  
breeds more complexity.

Furthermore, we're forced to be creative at the moment, think up simple  
but workable solutions to pressing problems. That gave us Squeakmap, BFAV,  
probably MC, etcetera. I don't share your pessimism, because tool-wise  
we've come a long way in under 2 years. If we pay someone to keep doing  
all this the old way, lots of pressures and itches to scratch will  
disappear... don't forget that.

I'm putting up the devil's advocate hat here, it'd be nice if more people  
could earn their money with Squeak, especially if they'd develop Squeak  
rather then develop in Squeak, but I'm not convinced that it is this  
community's most pressing problem at the moment. Personally, moving  
Squeak.org under community control and taking it from there (more  
information, more organization) seems like a simpler way.



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