[Squeakfoundation]Some goals for a Squeak Foundation

[ducasse]

Happy new year to all

I started to dream about what could do a Squeak Foundation. Here are the
lists of thoughts. I reduced them to the most important ones as the
resources will be limited.

- promote Squeak
    - CDs with all the platforms,
    - VM working on main system like Unix which is always lacking up to date
    ports, 
    - easy install, web plugging

- Basic tutorials for newcomers

- Improving the documentation
    -> Tests and comments

- Adding block closures

- Supporting the process of this wondeful open source movement in terms of
    managing projects, improving enhancement collection and inclusion in the
    image (while I was writing this last point I immediatley thought that
    the complete concept was ***wrong***. Changes should be integrated in
    subsystems that may compose image A or image B and we should get rid of
    this monolithic concept at least for system management and
    decomposition). I think that the Foundation should act as a catalyst
    to bring together the energy available in some key projects.

- Improving the code
       (modularising, shrinking the blob, refactoring the code adding tests)


as you certainly know I think that the two last points is really high in my
list of dream. Having a code that I can give to students to read without
saying that experimenting lead to some extreme or flawed design and be able
to help improving some parts of Squeak without having the impression that
this is for nothing would be great.

Stef

PS: last but not the least. SF should have measurable goals to be able to
evaluate if the goals are met or not and to have a feedback loop process to
improve. 


Be 2002 the year of Squeak