Hi Ken, sorry to respond to this a few weeks late.

Hopefully your questions are partly answered by the V3.9 Team progress report which I posted to the list yesterday. More below...

On Tue, 24 May 2005 16:10:59 -0500, "Ken Causey" ken@kencausey.com said:

I'm wondering what the current status is of the harvesting process from the standpoint of the harvesters. I'm a little bit bothered by the most recent addition to 3.9alpha. Judging from the HTTP info 6667TallySupport-ab.cs went into the update stream on the 22nd or 23rd. For some reason this update has no preamble although the versions both in BFAV (closed by the Janitors) and with the issue (ID 1014) on Mantis have preambles. Also the issue on Mantis is still marked as new and there is no evidence that harvesting (beyond the review step) is occurring regarding this issue.

Yes, there hasn't been much direction lately in terms of harvesting, partly my fault as I am probably still technically "in charge" of harvesting. But this is also due to shifting to a partitioned package model for 3.9alpha as described in the V3.9 progress report.

Once the new package model is in place, we can get back to getting harvesting up to speed again.

I'm not sure if I can lead the harvesting process effort in addition to working on the V3.9 process, we may either want to form an additional team for that, or see if the Janitors can take over that role.

Some of this is related to Mantis. I think the only big problem with Mantis right now is that its UI is outside of Squeak. It might not actually be *too* hard to get it running in Squeak simply by making some fixes/enhancements to Scamper so that it can be used via the Scamper browser. Then we can add UI goodies such as "browsing code" directly on a changeset file in Mantis. I believe the only issues with Scamper are getting html tables to display (doesn't have to be perfect), and supporting the kind of form posting which Mantis does. Or, a special Squeak Mantis client could be written separate from Scamper, although that sounds like more work. If a team or temporary group could be formed to work on this, that would be great. Any interest?

I realize we are in a highly transitional time here and that as a result there may be some confusion, but even if we don't have solid stated procedures I would hope that anyone modifying the update stream will make some effort to maintain a minimum level of documentation regarding the handling of each issue.

Agreed. Although this changes somewhat if we are updating packages via Monticello rather than using changesets. We'll have to see if we can get an equivalent level of documentation.

Admittedly I'm complaining here a little bit. But more than anything I would really like to have a bit better understanding of how updates will be entering the update stream in near future and what sort of changes, if any, those doing that work would like to see in the process.

Very shortly I want to state publicly that in my opinion the future of Squeak progress is in the form of individuals and teams taking direct responsibility for packages and parts of the image. I think that anyone who has an interest in doing this should not wait and should speak up ASAP.

On the plus side, the new partitioned image will be a big step in that direction.

- Doug