On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 06:06:54AM +0200, Igor Stasenko wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> forgive me for my ignorance, i'm just want to know the current state
> of Morphic package and it's destiny.

Morphic has been without a maintainer or a leader for a while.
Currently, there are three people/projects trying to improve
that situation:
- Gary Chambers has been making add-on improvements to Morphic
  as part of his day-job at Pinesoft, and a lot of people like
  them
- Bert and Yoshiki are maintaining Morphic so that eToys
  continues to be a useful system for kids. They did some core
  changes to Morphic to support nice zooming and more mouse
  cursors as part of OLPC EToys
- Edgar has done a project "Lladrillos" to modularize Morphic
  the same way 3.9 modularized squeak

> - is Morphic is 'frozen' by now?

Yes. It has not had major improvements in a long time.

> - is there are people who spending time improving/reviewing it?

See above

> My concern is not about fixing bugs or supporting it in general but
> about moving forward.
> 
> Lately, Gary Chambers added new feature to his UI Enhancements package
> to support a different kinds of fill styles (through subclassing a
> FillStyle).
> And after overlooking the changes/extensions it gives me a feeling
> that there is an big need in refactoring in Morphic to support this
> nice feature, instead of dealing with workarounds.
> 
> Who in charge there? Who is deciding what is good and what is bad?
> And how such things (like better and more flexible FillStyles) or any
> other improvements can find a way to make them appear in Morphic?
> Being more than a year with squeak community i didn't saw any
> noticeable movement around improvement Morphic/UI except Gary's work.

Indeed. Gary is doing more for Morphic than has been done in a
good while. I am sure he would make a great Morphic team leader
should he choose to. He listens to requests and knows how to
respond to them

I think the steps toward being a successful leader in a project
like squeak are something like this:

1. Make friends with the community at large
2. Find a group of people who care more than average about an
   issue that you care about
3. Discuss ideas deeply with your group, and listen to the
   community as well
4. Learn the skills of your group, and discuss what each of you
   could do personally to fix your issue.
5. Write a plan
6. Share the plan with your friends
7. Start acting out the plan

Gathering a group of friends, making plans, and acting on them
take effort. But I think it is how one leads. The single most
important thing, however, is communicating. If you are willing
to make a big effort at communicating, you are probably a good
leader, even if you aren't yet a good communicator.
Communication takes practice; don't despair if you aren't great
yet.

-- 
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/