Hello everyone,

+1 to everything Andreas, and Matthew said.

To re-iterate this is exactly where we have been heading with the squeak
3.11 effort.

If you look at the goal we want to achieve, it is clear that there are
two ways to approach it.
1) From the bits upwards as Elliot describes, and 2) From what we have,
and are using in production, downwards, in a carefully planned,
engineered effort.

Both ways require tools that work, ways for packaging things, defining
packages, dependencies, and loading those modules and tools for
generating the required result form the starting point.

We have several of these bottom up efforts on the go, Spoon, and
Coke/Pepsi/fonc/Albert or whatever it is called today. For myself I am
not a bits/bytes guy, not having to deal with that stuff is one reason I
came to Smalltalk in the first place.

1) So... Spoon
Spoon is an example of starting from the bottom, with a fresh view, a
fresh look at these tools. One hopes that spoon will do all of these
things superlatively, but I fear it will be a long time until I can use
it for my commercial stuff.

2) 3.11/4.0+  = Tools that allow us to Build stuff test stuff, package
stuff, and load stuff

The expectation is that with these tools in place everyone can benefit,
whether it be myself evolving 3.10 on to 3.11 slowly, Matthew in the
relicencing, or Edgar and Klaus with the kernel images.

If we all have the same tools, and compatible packaging, external to our
treasured creations, we start to have some common ground, and the
ability to share ideas.

We do not expect to get everyone to use the exact same kernel, but we
think we can get folks sharing stuff. If they share tools like
Monticello, then it ensures that there is some minimal level of
compatibility preserved between the forks. They can only share stuff
like Monticello, if they can load it and keep up with the most
maintained versions.

Once the common tools are in place, then Matthews common core packages
can actually happen. 3.11 may not change much in functionality, but it
is planning to do things like splitting "System" category up into sub
packages.

regards

Keith