[V3dot10] Doing updates

[Matthew Fulmer]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2008 at 07:23:35AM -0300, Edgar J. De Cleene wrote:
> Folks:
> 
> I wish start 3.11 with my proposal .
> Mail of Masashi Umezawa remember us updates go to Mantis and some should be
> done.
> Until DS or MC2 was ready, the only choice is continue Ralph designed
> procedure.
> But  I wish some here give his approval or not.

I heartily approve of most of your plan, but not all of it.

Your plan to strip out the image and start modularizing Morphic
is a good one. I believe it could revive Morphic as an
actively-developed toolkit for building applications, and also,
with effort, eliminate the incompatibilities Morphic has between
all the forks of Squeak. Much like Monticello 1.5 merged
together all the MC improvements from Impara, 3.10, and Croquet,
This could be the start of a standard Morphic release,
independent of the specific image, a Morphic 2.5, if you will.




However, I Really did not like how you handled communication
with the rest of the community during 3.10. I would like you to
do two things differently:

First, Make yourself available to the community. Log in to
#squeak when you can, ask questions about little decisions you
want to make in your project, and answer little questions that
people have. People really like a person who discusses his
project personally with them. 

What problem does this solve? 3.10 was viewed by many as a
communication disaster. No one knew how things were being
decided, and no one knew how to influence the decision making
process. Therefore, nobody contributed. To get people to feel
comfortable enough with your project to contribute, you must
advertise "Here is how decisions are made, and here is how to
influence what goes in and out, and here is what we need more
data on in order to make an informed decision to accept or
reject a fix". 

Second, lower the barrier to contributions for volunteers who
would like to help.  Volunteer contributors are very valuable,
and you should do what you can to get and keep them. The 3.10
process was a disaster in this regard; you did two things to
drive volunteers away:

1. You were never around to discuss what is happening "right
   now" in the release process.
2. You didn't widely advertise how to contribute.




Keith Hodges is a good example of how to do this right, and the
tool he produced, namely the Installer wiki, goes a long way
toward lowering the barrier to contributors:

1. Keith is always accessible via IRC, so anyone can ask him a
   quick question and get to know him. Someone who hangs around
   and answers questions is really easier to trust.

2. The image-building process is very easy and well-advertised
   throughout the wiki. It is simply:
        
        Installer install: '311'

3. There is a designated bin for people to request that people
   examine bug fixes and test them for inclusion in the official
   image. Also, it is easy to test them. Rather than click on
   links in a page and download and install fixes one at a time,
   simply execute:

        Installer install: 'MinorFixesUnstable'

   The more people review fixes, the more people leave comments
   on whether they work or not, and the quicker the release team
   can decide whether the fix should be included in the official
   image. Finally, it is easy for the release team to mark the
   change as "official"; simply remove the change from
   http://installer.pbwiki.com/MinorFixesUnstable-Squeak3:10 and
   add it to
   http://installer.pbwiki.com/MinorFixes-Squeak3:10 . This is a
   huge productivity boost over the 3.10 method of publishing a
   new package and writing a new update script every time a bug
   fix was accepted.

4. Unload scripts are equally public and easy to use:

        Installer install: 'Clean'

   and the script is at
   http://installer.pbwiki.com/Clean-Squeak3:10




Why is this better than ReleaseBuilderFor3dot10? First of all,
People can use whatever image they want and test these scripts,
whereas, with ReleaseBuilder, they must use your special image,
http://ftp.squeak.org/3.10/Squeak3.11.alpha.7160.zip .
If people can use their own, personal image for testing changes,
it heightens the sense of ownership, and helps make the release
process more comfortable to them.

Second, Keith has made it well known how to submit contributions
to the wiki; It is world-writable with a password of "squeak".
Adding scripts to ReleaseBuilder is much harder, requiring
access to a locked-out repository. Also, ReleaseBuilder has no
sense of "unstable" vs. "stable", so you must be sure something
works before publicizing it. However, the way to make sure it
works is to publish it and get testers. The wiki makes
publishing and testing, easy, without as high a risk that the
official release will be broken.




So, in summary, please go ahead with your stripping goals, but
make yourself available and welcoming to contributions. Keith
has the tools to help you do that. Please use them.

-- 
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808