[Squeakfoundation]Re: How to get stuff into Squeak?

[Henrik Gedenryd]

> Absolutely. There are two models: the "benevolent dictator" model, where one
> person decides at whim and the community reverse engineers the rules from
> that, and the "committee of judges" model, with a set of rules laid out and
> multiple people having write access to the repository work through
> contributions and make their decisions based on the public rules.
> 
> I think the latter is more suited to the Squeak Community, iff SqC decides to
> give up full control (it's quite silent from there at the moment, I hope this
> means something good's brewing :-)). At the moment, they embody a sort of
> "benevolent central committee" model...

Alright peoples,

Now you got me subscribed so I can chip in on this. No need to reinvent the
wheel, and we've had update collection in the past. Stefan Matthias Aust
(sma) took care of update collection, well still does but not actively for
the moment I guess :-) He posted good guidelines for this. Also I
volunteered to step in for a while last fall so I have one piece of
experience of doing this.

SqC doesn't really collect updates, they just grab one here and there if
they see a particular reason for it.

I remember getting some discussion & guidelines on how to make the
selection, but even given that, in my experience there can be no clear-cut
set of rules. The guy who does the (hard, unrewarding) work of collecting
and fixing up people's rather ill-behaved postings gets to pass the final
judgement on this. That's the only "reward" and frankly it just made me wary
that I'd let the wrong things into the image.

Many times you can give good reasons (and sma even posted them publicly).
But sometimes you can't, or you don't even want to. ("Sorry, newcomer X, but
your code's just too shaky, we'll have to pass on that for now")

Trouble #1 in my view is that so few people volunteer to do these utterly
unselfish chores. Loads of these have to be done to get the stable image up
to par with 3.1, and people will absolutely have to change about this, or
stable Squeak will give in to the infant death syndrome.

Since sma has had good reasons to pass on his duties, in effect no
contributions have gone into Squeak since last fall (I think it was).
Personally I think the quality of the image degraded badly through 2.9 and
3.0 alpha. Due to the rushed release of 3.0 I think that 3.0 may be the most
buggy Squeak image ever, ironically enough, since it's distributed on the
book CD.

I also have a few ideas about how to organize the system. I'll put them in
their own posting.

Henrik