Gee, didn't they tell you that when you took the job that you could only give it up if you died and you still need to give 2 years notice?
Hi all,
Sorry for being so quiet; I've been extremely busy (in fact, if it continues like this, I should probably step down as leader here, since it's silly to have a leader who takes a week to answer emails...).
Anyway, comments below...
I see that most of the listed packages have still not been assigned. I wonder if we might have more luck making the initial package list even more coarse, and trying to get more than one maintainer for each. E.g. just have one Tools package with a few maintainers, instead of trying to find a maintainer each for Tools-Browser, Tools-Changes, etc.
Definitely. And as I have said, people can always divide further later on.
If that looks like it will work better, great. We haven't had such a rush to sign up for pieces that I feel that list is set in stone; Doug, if you have a more granular set of packages in mind, please feel free to just change it.
Also, it would probably help a bit to beg on squeak-dev for more volunteers. :)
Indeed. But Avi has the ball now. ;)
I'm a little reluctant to ask for too much outside help until we have a better sense of what the task is, how well the tool support works, what good approaches to the problem are. I was hoping we would do a reasonable amount of work just with the people on this list first to establish that before begging for more people to get involved.
So let me beg here instead: who is actually interested in doing partitioning work? Anyone? Is this just something that we care about more in the abstract than in practice, and nobody really wants it enough to do it? Are there other ways we should be thinking about this that would get more traction? (like, "how many bits of code can we package up and unload from the image?")
And I say (yet again) don't get held up in refactoring. Let's just start pumping out 2-3 PIs so that we get this show on the road.
I don't really know what "pumping out PIs" means, or at least what purpose it's supposed to achieve. It seems to me that something like "registering packages on SqueakMap" is much more meaningful, no? Which tools (apart from the PackageList that nobody uses for anything, and I think we agreed to drop) actually know or care with PackageInfo instances exist inside the image?
Basically, I think there is more danger that the effort will stall if a private stream is used, because then there will be a big merging effort required at the end. In fact, if everyone can see progress being made in the public stream, that might encourage more people to contribute.
Yes, I agree in full. Avi?
Fine with me.
Is there anything else we need to do to help this move forward? Will most of the PI managing/recategorizing be done with the Monticello tools? (We've discussed adding MC to Basic as part of this.) Also, we should add Ned's PI extras to Basic (the 3.9 stream).
I would like to hear Avi's thought on how we handle the PIs, as classes or instances? There was a discussion around that earlier, and possibly classes is the way to go since our main tools (ChangeSets, MC) are centered around that. But I trust Avi to make that decision.
I don't see a concrete place yet where introducing PI subclasses will help with the packaging work, especially given the init script stuff that Miso, Ned and I have been kicking around. So let's stick with instances for now.
Avi