[Squeakfoundation]Re: releasing SqueakMap (was "One more update for 3.2.1?"... again...)

[Doug Way]

Craig Latta wrote:
> 
> Hi Doug--
> 
> > Also, I suppose if the goal is to move 3.4 toward a release
> > relatively soon (in the next month or two?) then getting the SM
> > bootstrap into the 3.2 series becomes less urgent.
> 
>         Why can't we leave 3.2 alone and make 3.4 the venue of SqueakMap's
> mainstream debut?
> 
>         Will someone please summarize the rationale for revisiting a "final"
> release here, and for getting into tertiary version numbers?

I think most of the rationale for revisiting the 3.2 release was based on some discussions before OOPSLA (in other words, before the decision was made to abandon 3.3alpha).

Daniel, Goran, Ned and I had a few email conversations with Scott & SqC about adding some basic support for SqueakMap in 3.2.  This seemed like an important goal at the time, because having SM easily accessible to everyone via the update stream would be a big boost to SM usage.  We still weren't sure what was going to happen with 3.3alpha, and we hadn't considered leapfrogging 3.3alpha to go to 3.4alpha yet.

Also, the last few Squeak releases (3.0, 3.2) had been about a year apart, and we didn't want to wait around for 3.3alpha to become stable, which probably would have been another long wait.

Now that we're working toward 3.4, and we've decided that it should be finalized relatively soon, I suppose there wasn't a great need to split off 3.2.  Oh well. :-)  However, there were a lot of 3.2-compatible packages already in place on SqueakMap, so it seemed like SqueakMap should have some sort of debut in the 3.2 world.  (I was thinking in my recent message that since we already split off 3.2.1, we might as well add the SqueakMap bootstrap too, but that's not super-important.)

(Scott and/or SqC came up with 3.2.1 version name.  But to me it seems like the best name for what it represents, it indicates a minor change to 3.2.  It probably wouldn't have been good just to add the updates to 3.2, since 3.2 had already been declared "final" and was out on squeak.org for a couple of months.)

Okay, enough about that... onward with 3.4alpha. :-)

- Doug