Dear Edgar,
My own personal goal with my contributions to 3.11 is to encourage teamwork, the contributions of others and the potential for integration of the various existing streams of squeak past present and future. My other goal is to continue to have a solid basis on which to build commercial applications. I believe that Matthew and others share these goals, and we also recognize that it is not going to be easy to achieve.
Having professed this goal a number of months ago, I find it very disappointing and somewhat ironic we now have 3 different planned routes forward for 3.10+. Especially since the fundamentals of the way all three branches have proposed moving forward are essentially the same.
For you to say there has been no progress in 8 months indicates to me that you haven't looked at the progress that IS being made. I think there has been lots of progress.
Example 1 ======== If we take a goal of 3.10 and 3.11, that being to unload packages from the image all the way back to a kernel image and make them loadable again. Kernel images dont have a UI, so if we do not have an effective tool for loading things back in again, there is no point in taking things out in the first place. Hopefully Sake/Packages is that tool.
So with your infinite knowledge of loading lots of things into squeak to build FunSqueak, there is a great deal that you can contribute to the community effort of 3.11. You could help fill Sake/Packages with your knowledge of how to load and unload packages into 3.10.
Example 2 ======== Some that know better than I have stated that Atomic Loading is needed for effectively managing loading/unloading crucial packages in the kernel. Monticello 1.5 has supported Atomic Loading for a while, however there have been some System Editor bugs to iron out, which we now think has been done. So in the past 8 months the possibility of Atomic loading has moved from coded and guaranteed to crash your image to actually usable. This is progress, because without it we know that the release team would expect real pain the closer the KernelImage ideal is reached.
Example 3 ======== One major hindrance to the different streams working together has been the traits issue. Thanks to Matthew's UnloadTraits script this is no longer as big an issue as it was.
The above three examples demonstrate that there has indeed been significant progress in the past 8 months, and these are not the only examples.
The current situation is that we have some already overworked people working on different things, and there is always room for more contributions. However we know that our sub-projects will eventually work together for good. None of us feel we need to take over and "do it all ourselves". There are lots and lots of smaller sub-projects to which you could contribute, to the team effort.
so how about it?
Keith