[squeak-dev] Re: Call For *Your* Opinion

Ralph Boland rpboland at gmail.com
Sat Apr 24 15:13:03 UTC 2010


= Survey ======

1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?

I am working on some open source projects which are not ready for release.
When they are ready I will release them.
The only thing I released so far was my  FasterSets package.  It was pretty
much ignored until  Levente Uzonyi decided to rewrite it from scratch and had
his version contributed to trunk.
As a result my contribution to Squeak is still 0.

2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

>From my point of view I am contributing.  I am just not able to release
what I have done yet.  Given that my opinions on matters I have posted
on have generally differed from just about everybody else  it will be
interesting to see how my contributions are received once they are
released.

3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?
I hope (not necessarily expect) that some subset of the community will
take sufficient interest in the contribution to provide valuable feedback
and perhaps even get involved in improving the contribution.
For the latter I guess Levente Uzonyi did this in the extreme with my
FasterSets package.  Beware of what you wish for, your wish may be
granted.

4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
other community members, according to you?
I really don't know.  I know some people are contributing a lot.
I assume part of the issue is that there just aren't a lot of others.
I know Keith Hodges used to contribute a lot to Squeak but has
become alienated from this community and so releases little
now.  I consider this a serious loss for Squeak.

5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
contributions and the number of contributors?
I don't really know.   Given the small size of the Smalltalk/Squeak
communities though I view all the forks with some level of regret.
More forks means more innovation I know but my main thought
is that I am going to have to port my contributions to each of the
forks and that is a pain.  Anything that can be done to reduce this
pain will help.

6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
highest)

Around  4.  My biggest frustration is making a posting requesting
feedback and getting no feedback at all.
There is a tendency of readers of my posts to jump on some point
in a posting and then ignore the rest of the posting.
This can be frustrating at times.
I experience these problems with other communities as well.


Regards,

Ralph Boland



-- 
Volume * Density = Mass.
Volume / Density = Intelligence.
The latter equation explains the equal intelligence
of men and women and the capabilities of some
well known operating systems.



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