Steve,

Ah yes, the old "it's too hard to do the right thing, so let's do what we want to do" argument. Haha ... no offense taken. As you mention it is easy to fall into that trap.

While it's true that I put a lot of effort into Metacello, it isn't true that "I deserve all the credit" ... nothing happens in a vacuum, significant contributions were made by Stef, Doru, Mariano, Alexandre and others (I guess this is the season for the Academy Awards:) ... thanks, and enough of that:)

Metacello was created to address a specific set of problems that I was having while working on GLASS and those problems were being experienced by a wider group of folks than just myself and the users of GLASS, which lead to it's broad acceptance ...

With that said, I always maintain that there are "more than one way to skin a cat." And Metacello just happens to be one of the ways to skin the cat.

I've been living in the Smalltalk community for most of the last 25+ years so just I don't have the familiarity with the other configuration management systems to do a good job of integrating them into the Smalltalk development environment ... 

My take is that it will be "too hard" (right back at ya:), especially for me.

To the extent that I have the time I am willing to offer you (or anyone else working in the area on alternate approaches) constructive criticism as well as advice about what I consider the "barriers to acceptance" are going to be ...

Dale

----- Original Message -----
| From: "Steve Wart" <steve at wart.ca>
| To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
| Cc: "VWNC" <vwnc at cs.uiuc.edu>, "Janko Mivšek" <janko.mivsek at eranova.si>, Pharo-project at lists.gforge.inria.fr
| Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2012 11:47:34 AM
| Subject: Re: [squeak-dev] Re: [Smalltalk for small projects only?
| 
| 
| Hi Dale
| 
| First let me apologize for using such a horrible IT euphemism. I have
| been hanging around software politicians for far too long. I think
| you deserve all the credit for coming up with an elegant and
| effective configuration management system that has brought many
| parts of the Smalltalk community together to build common, useful
| and practical tools.
| 
| Regarding your race suggestion, I think you are right that having
| more choices will be good for the community. I can't claim that I
| don't have resources available - I can come up with a few hours a
| week to work on this. I'll start with the links Frank posted, but I
| think the two approaches in the end may share some common features.
| 
| I've been thinking about this idea for a long time but without
| feedback I haven't had the courage to start. Maybe I can finally
| help.
| 
| Cheers,
| Steve
| 
| 
| On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Dale Henrichs < dhenrich at vmware.com
| > wrote:
| 
| 
| Steve,
| 
| I have two comments:
| 
| 1. "inventing the future" doesn't happen by considering
| how "ambitious" it may seem. In the end it is probably
| easier than you think and harder than I think. If it was
| real easy, I'd have been done by now:)
| 
| 2. I propose a race:
| 
| You start working on your git backend for Smalltalk and
| I'll continue working on Metacello, first one to "git work
| flow" wins ... But then the real winners will be the Smalltalk
| Community...
| 
| I have said this before: "I can hardly wait until someone
| invents the replacement for Metacello---it will give me
| more time for other projects:)"
| 
| 
| Dale
| 
| ----- Original Message -----
| 
| 
| | From: "Steve Wart" < steve at wart.ca >
| | 
| | The idea of building the git workflow on top of metacello strikes
| | me
| | as being somewhat ambitious.
| 
| 
| 
| 
|