[squeak-dev] The future of Squeak & Pharo (was Re: [Pharo-project] [ANN] Pharo MIT license clean)

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Sun Jun 28 21:56:51 UTC 2009


I'd like to add, that's Keith's effort to build the infrastructure for
developers to simplify distributing & loading their work on
different forks is extremely valuable.

By having this infrastructure at first place, we would never spend
hours/days trying to port/adopt stuff to another fork
- a maintainer is responsible for adopting his package and including
the scripts to load it into the image w/o errors.
And Sake, Installer and other related stuff is could greatly help with that.

As i understand, the 3.11 would be the first image which
includes/based on such infrastructure. But it seems people keep doing
things in old ways. I can't blame them for that. But if we really want
to move on, we should adopt this idea.

2009/6/29 Juan Vuletich <juan at jvuletich.org>:
> Hi Keith,
>
> Thank you for the detailed and thoughtful answer. All you say here is
> important. I was aware of the new process. I was not aware of some of the
> details for 3.11 and 4.0. Thanks for all this.
>
> However, I am not asking about the this. What I'm after is the general, long
> term objectives of Squeak. The kind of statement the Board should come with,
> with the endorsement of the Board.
>
> For example, Pharo says:
> - a progressive, open-source Smalltalk platform for professional use
> - a flexible environment to support the research of new language concepts
> - We will really favor evolutionary and incremental changes. We want to be
> able to experiment with important new features or libraries.
> - Beauty to learn from
> - Not backward compatible
> - Clean, lean and fast
>
> Cuis says:
> - Close to the ideas in Smalltalk-80 and "Design Principles Behind
> Smalltalk".
> - Include only kernel functionality.
> - Included stuff should be in very good shape.
> - Include a greatly simplified version of Morphic as the main UI.
> - Easy to fix and extend.
> - Cuis is yours to extend it to suit your needs.
> - Stable. Smalltalk kernel should not change much.
> - Compatible to a reasonable degree with packages intended for other Squeak
> distributions.
> - There will be optional packages available for Cuis, if people start
> building or using them. We don't want to control that process.
>
> For Squeak, along these lines, from your email I select
> - We have more backwards and forwards compatibility now than we ever had
> before. The crux of the difference between squeak and pharo philosophies has
> been the issue of backwards compatability.
> - The stated goal has been for at least 3 years to work towards a kernel
> image, with which people can build up the custom image
> - The proposal is to have a range of deliverables for different goals, from
> minimal images to fully loaded images for testing. that they want.
>
> These kind of stuff should be at the top of Squeak.org, so people (even old
> timers like me) can know where is Squeak headed.
>
> Thanks,
> Juan Vuletich
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.



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