On 08.08.2009, at 22:59, Keith Hodges wrote:
> [...snip...]
> This decision has been made entirely due to the actions of the board,
> and the downright disrespectful behaviour of some of its members.  In
> particular no efforts were made to contact me in the 8 weeks preceding
> the announcement of this "new" (exactly the same mindset as before)
> process. Subsequently I have asked the board to discuss their terms of
> engagement, and since I have not had any sign of movement on this, I
> have had enough. I feel that way I have been treated is simply not
> acceptable.

> [...snap...]

I promised to you privately to bring this up in this week's board  
meeting. I did, and we discussed it (alone, alas, as you refused to  
join the meeting). The minutes went not really into detail, but it's  
the second paragraph. The gist was that we do watch how the discussion  
and contributions here unfold.

In the "8 weeks" you mention the board did speak to the Release Team  
leader, which is Matthew. Maybe the release team list would have been  
better - something to keep in mind for the future (or maybe release  
discussion should happen on squeak-dev, we are too small a community  
for too many lists).

The fact is that we did talk to the Release Team, but could still not  
get a coherent picture of where the release actually was. The new  
process you developed did certainly not get much traction in the  
community. Perhaps it is too alien - as I said before, people do need  
time to change their habits. And they might still adopt it, the trunk  
model is not really in conflict with automatic image building and  
testing, as you well know.

But we felt there needed to be a way to make contributing simple, and  
have visible progress. The trunk model is a way to enable people to  
again participate in the Squeak development process, and that seems to  
work.

It's still not clear how an actual release will be derived from the  
trunk. We were discussing it in the Board meeting, and opinions  
differed. So discussion will continue, and we're hoping for ideas to  
come from the community.

I for one would love to have automatic image building from the trunk,  
and simply declare one of the automated builds to be "the one", after  
an appropriate time of code slush and code freeze of course. But many  
other models are possible, and you, as anyone else, is invited to  
discuss them.

- Bert -