For those who got to wondering about that strange quietness in module land -
About a week ago I tried to compile a shopping list of stuff we still need to make modules. I mailed some people that had shown some sort of interest. Anyway, this became a fast and furious discussion, that became a mailing list at sqmodules@lists.advantive.com, courtesy of Stephen Pair.
I thought this was a good time to announce it here, because some people were asking questions. So anyone seriously interested in module, and not minding the smoke, sparks and rough edges of really raw code is invited to join.
A bit about what's going on - Andreas Raab has convinced us that it'd be better to move to strong modules now, mostly in order to simplify the code and the mental model of how things should work. This requires some major changes to the tool set, and he's just released a first version of a module aware browser. This includes nice support for automatically keeping track of dependencies.
Stephen Pair and I thought up a nice and simple way of passing around the names of modules for people to load - just make it a Url. Select something like loadmodule:/People/dvf/GraphAlgorithms in any text pane, bring up the menu, url-it, and that's it, you have a module. I'll post that here soon.
Stephen Pair's selectors spaces are also a hot topic of discussion, and he's been refining the ideas and working out an implementation, to help round out modules later.
If you want more detail, and especially if you're already working on modules (CraigL, Torge,you there?) you're welcome to read the archives and join us there. Note that traffic's been somewhat heavy lately.
Of course whenever something's ready for prime time, things will be presented here.
The original reason for the separate discussion was that modules were not popular and not easily popularized. When modules become a little more mainstream, the discussion should probably return to squeak-dev.
Daniel