[squeak-dev] [Cuis] Cuis

keith keith_hodges at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Jan 20 13:54:28 UTC 2010


Hi Juan,

I have been looking for a viable kernel on which to build my future  
production images, and a friendly community in which to participate.

We had tabled the idea of forming a "guild" of nice people and squeak/ 
pharo package developers for those of us who develop packages that we  
would like to be available to all oss smalltalkers. The problem being  
that squeak/pharo cores are wildly shifting sands, intent on imposing  
the ideas of their creators upon us, and they aren't really kernels,  
nor are they progressing in that direction.

However with Cuis being more minimal, the architecture has the  
potential to be better layered, into kernel, system and application  
layers. Discussions in irc, seemed to suggest that Cuis might be a  
viable option.

I have lots of questions and ideas.

My first question is, do you have a plan? And where would be the forum  
for discussing plans. Are you on irc? Do you have a process for  
contributions to the Cuis kernel?

In irc #squeak we had an impromptu discussion about making MC1.6  
loadable, and providing tools like Sake/Packages and Installer for  
Cuis. I think that the ethos of Cuis being simple enough to be  
understandable fits quite well. For example, Installer was originally  
designed, as a means to an end, to be 1 class, but the "Installer  
replacement" new kid on the block "Gopher" is 33, and Sake/Packages is  
4ish classes but Metacello is 40 classes. By the time Pharo has MC,  
MC2, Gopher and metacello loaded you are looking at 400 classes in the  
image just for doing a #fileIn!

In contrast Sake/Packages can potentially use a visitor to walk the  
dependency graph, in order to generate scripts. So "Bob the Builder"  
can potentially generate and apply a build script to an absolute  
minimal cuis image using #fileIn:

I propose a way forward, to establish a number of initiatives, mini- 
projects, with the aim of contributing to the "kernel" of Cuis, and  
dividing up "System" to be a set of loadable modules to make "core/ 
system" layer. I propose prefixing cuis discussions on squeak-dev with  
[Cuis] so we can filter out our discussions from squeak noise. Is  
there a cuis-dev list?

So as an example, HTTPSocket/Network is conspicuous by its absence.  
Shall we estabish a project to work on this, or is it in hand?

regards

Keith






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