This talk of paying worries me.  I see many open source projects that
do very well with very little funding.  I see many people participating
in Squeak -- after all, just look how many ENH's we have.  :)  Surely
there is a way to channel all this energy, especially given the large
number of successful OS projects in the universe?

I fear that if we use money to prop up our current situation, we will
just keep on doing things in a sub-optimal way.  Surely we can figure
out what the other guys do, that we do not?  I do not oppose spending money
in general on Squeak; I simply worry about trying to use it to speed up
business as usual.




> - 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.

Here here!!  You are all tired of hearing it, but Debian does
*fabulously* on very little money.  8000+ packages and 900+ developers. 
A major part of Debian, I think, is that everything is divided into
packages and each package has a maintainer.  Un-maintained packages are
gradually marginalized and then removed from the distribution.  When
there is a bug report, it's easy to see who is responsible, and it's
easy for the responsible person to become aware of it.

Are there any bugs posted against Chuck right now on Mantis?  I have no
idea.  And what about Nebraska, which is still in the image?  Eek.  In
Debian, I have exactly two bug reports open.


> - 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.

I don't know if it needs to be the front page, but I certainly agree
that our current situation is very confusing.  Further, it's tough to
contribute.  As I've posted before, opening BFAV and looking at random
enh's and fix's is quite hard, and feels wasteful of my time.

	http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2004-June/078737.html

It has occured to me to sign up as the Nebraska maintainer, but I don't
even know how.  I could figure it out, I guess, and I will eventually,
but shouldn't this be very easy?  Someone volunteered for EToys not too
long ago (Ned I think), and it was actually *overlooked* because they
merely posted it to the list.

A SqueakSource-like portal would rock, but a great start would be for
someone to go through the swiki and really organize all the pages about
our processes, whatever they are.  Start from here:

	"How to contribute to Squeak"
	http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3279

This page is honestly not bad, but it bothers me that "maintain a
package" and "assume responsibility for a segment of Squeak" are not
listed on this page.  I know its in the swiki somewhere...

> 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. 

Well, I'd like to see it, but again, I want us to be extremely careful
about where we interject money.  It will prop up one part, but if it is
failing on its own, is it really something we want to spend money on?

I say we pay people to make Squeak books.  :)


-Lex