Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>>>>>> "Josh" == Josh Gargus <josh at schwa.ca> writes:
> 
> Josh> I believe that the two visions are fundamentally at odds.  I don't think
> Josh> that it is a technical shortcoming of Sake/Packages, I just think that
> Josh> any attempt to have universal cross-fork compatibility is fundamentally
> Josh> doomed to either:
> 
> Josh> 1) fail, or
> 
> Josh> 2) "succeed", but at the cost of preventing fundamental improvements to
> Josh> the programming model
> 
> Indeed.  One of the problems of non-trunk development is that the barrier
> to contribution is far higher, because each individual contributor has
> to understand how to make his idea *work* with *all* base images.
> 
> Whereas the model we have now, the Squeak base gets better by local commits
> and by borrowing things that make sense from Pharo and Cuis, even though the
> Pharo and Cuis committers didn't even know or care that Squeak may want to
> borrow it.
> 
> And Pharo is getting better by borrowing *relevant* commits from
> Squeak.
> 
> And I, as an individual committer to Squeak, don't have to know or care
> whether my patch will work on Pharo.  It's up to the Pharo guys to
> figure that out.
> 
> This is a far better system.  More commits, more progress has been made in the
> past six months than the previous 18 months.

What's boggling me about this whole brouhaha is this: surely our 
situation - several similar-but-not-identical Smalltalks - is pretty 
much like the BSD world?

It's not up to, say, the FreeBSD developers to make sure that the ports 
stay working. That's what port maintainers are for.

The port maintainer of, say, curl, then needs to make sure that curl 
works nicely on FreeBSD. Ditto for the NetBSD maintainer (who might, of 
course, be the same guy).

People who actually write the packages - the curl developers, in this 
example - either care about their software running everywhere, in which 
case they stick to standards and try minimise platform specific stuff, 
or they don't.

Of course the various roles don't just blindly muck about, but I hope we 
don't need to keep actually saying "and the person tries to communicate 
with the other people in the ecosystem".

frank