Colin, 

My comments are online below.

On May 12, 2010, at 8:08 AM, Colin Putney <cputney at wiresong.ca> wrote:

> Why all the hate for OmniBrowser?

It's not hate. OB is a cool piece of software. I'm very sorry if I've offended. 

> Above, you seem to be saying, "I want a browser with the features that OmniBrowser has, but without the flexibility and modularity."

I like the refactoring functionality that's there. The icons are nice, but I don't need them. Most folks have been talking about wanting a smaller, less complex base system in Squeak. OB strikes me as large and complex, which I think is a fair statement: it's complex because it does a lot. 

> You're even suggesting that someone should do a lot of work (and yes, it *is* a lot of work) to reimplement the functionality that OB already provides. 

I suggested looking into how much work it would be to integrate the refactoring engine. Now that I think about it, we'd probably also need AST and Regex to use just that, wouldn't we? Three packages seems like a lot to add to the main Squeak distribution; may as well include OB too. I'd like to retract that statement. Mea culpa.

> By the way, there are quite a few other projects that use the OB framework. Off the top of my head:
> 
> - Seaside use it for configuration
> - The Gemstone interface to Monticello is based on OB (runs great in Squeak!).
> - The Gemstone Test-Runner is based on OB (runs great in Squeak!).
> - Hernán Durand's Dependency Browser is based on OB
> - My FileBrowser package
> - OB-Tools, a debugger and inspector based on OB.

I stand corrected. This maybe explains why I couldn't find the configuration manager panel anywhere when I last installed Seaside:) as this time I didn't have OB loaded. 

> Now, OB isn't perfect. It has issues and bugs just like any significant piece of software. But why not fix them, or at least complain so that others can fix them?

I think the key word here is 'significant;' OB has a lot of moving parts. The more moving parts there are in an application, the more likely one of those moving parts is to break when something changes in a dependency (e.g., Squeak, as has apparently already happened in 4.1.)

Let me ask you a couple of questions: is OB currently developed on the Squeak platform? How many active developers does OB have? 

Most of the related posts I've seen in squeak-dev have been from confused folk wondering which packages to load in order to get it working, or from people wondering why something or other isn't working after picking some packages and loading them. My suspicion is that OB development is ongoing in Pharo. Are there enough interested people with the requisite knowledge to keep OB working in Squeak?

IIRC, awhile back you (I'm pretty sure it was you) sent mail to the list about a .sar with an official release. I was really happy about that. I installed it at the time and everything seemed to be working. I went back a few weeks ago to hunt down that file, and (while I don't have the link handy) it seemed to be missing from the server. Where can I get the most recent Squeak compatible release of OB now? I'm wondering if it might work out better for some of the folks wanting to try out OB than playing Russian roulette with SqueakSource packages.

Colin, I want to be clear: I have nothing against OmniBrowser; I've used it on and off and quite like it. I'm just against making it "the" browser in Squeak at this time, and I think it's rather large to include in the image just as an optional feature. In fact, just the other day, I threw in two cents saying that Regex should be in the standard image, and even that was met with friction.  
  
> Colin
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