Hi Christoph and Jakob,

> Now since Squeak does not switch to Git (given the feelings of several
prominent people here towards Git)

Hmm, that doesn't sound quite right.  What I sense are such (positive)
"feelings" TOWARDS Git in some members, it has them wanting to use *that
particular tool* (vs. other tools or solutions which could also address the
community's needs, i.e., see below).  I sometimes think "the tool" and the
associated "popularity" is the end-goal in and of itself, rather than the
output artifact.  Please pardon me if I'm mistaken about that.  For me,
it's not really anything about any "feelings" about Git as the
(im)practicality of integration.  It's a beast.  To bring a beast into
_everyone's_ workflow that has 90% more "stuff" than we need, and requires
them to sign up just to use -- I think it would be a "filter" on the
community, especially of non-developers (hint:  You and Jakob are
developers).  For me, being hosted by a private company is not so
attractive.

I do think some of these issues you describe with the Inbox contribution
process are shallow enough they could be largely mitigated with simple
upgrades to our existing tools.  For example, you could submit an
improvement that allows original contributors of Inbox items to move them
to Treated themself.  You could add a button to filter out all entries in
the Inbox which have further descendants also in the Inbox.  You could make
an, "update from Inbox" which would only download packages for which have
your loaded versions as ancestors.  There are many simple things that could
be done.  A bug-tracker is a bigger deal, but it's often a lot less
overhead to just FIX the bug than open, track, and close a bug report.  We
do have Mantis to keep track of the longer-term bugs.

But, again, this is "not Git", which seems to be the desired "feature".  :/

We have *decades* of Monticello packages for Squeak across not just our own
repositories, but many other "external" legacy repositories.  (i.e., see
the "repositories" category of Installer class side).  Obviously, our tools
and methodology will be an on-going discussion, but I don't see this legacy
ever going away completely, no matter what we do, Monticello will continue
to be used by some.  It seems clear that the only path to Git and other
tools is a backward-compatible integration with existing tools, a "stepping
stone" that doesn't require a major adjustment like losing method-level
timestamp information.  But it's not going to write itself.  Only the
burning interest within people like you and/or Jakob will get it done.  :)

 - Chris
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