On Apr 3, 2004, at 10:46 PM, Lawson English wrote:

From the response I got to my "test" message, I assume that the list was sorta dead for a while. Anyone have any major news to report? I've been out of touch for quite some time and the websites seem to be a bit out-of-date.

The squeak community is still as active as ever... but it seems that all of the discussions have been happening over on squeak-dev lately.

I can see why some people might just follow this list, though... if you just want a rough idea of what's going on with squeak it's a lot easier to follow a less-busy list. Well, this used to work, anyway. ;-)

As far as major news goes, there's a new effort to make a 64-bit Squeak, which is planned for the next release (4.0). See forwarded message. Also, 3.7 moved to beta a few days ago, and will be released sometime next month.

- Doug

----------------------------------------------------------- Subject: [ANN]A plan for 3.8/4.0... (insert drumroll here) From: goran.krampe@bluefish.se Date: April 1, 2004 4:40:16 PM EST To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

Hi all!

There has been something tasty cooking off-list in the Squeak community the last few days and it fell upon me to present it to the community at large. Which I do gladly. :)

NOTE: The following is my perception, if there is anything wrong here - the appropriate people will surely slap me and correct it. :)

----

As most of you know we just entered 3.7beta and IMHO it looks pretty good. The 3.7 release will not be far away and at that time we typically open up 3.8alpha. So if there are any Cool Things going on that might affect the plan for the upcoming 3.8 and beyond, the timing was "just right" to bring it to the table...

And a Cool Thing just happened to drop in! Dan Ingalls has been testing the waters for getting the support of the community in spearheading an effort for Squeak version 4.0 *including a full 64-bit port* to the IA64 ("Itanium").

Yup, you heard it right - with the help of Dan we are entering the land of terabyte images. :)

And after exchanging a few emails we Guides of course decided to turn him down, we don't need no stinking 64 bi... eh, NOT! ;)

The following is a short description of a battle plan for 3.8/4.0 that Dan brought forward and that we Guides support (well, I haven't heard anyone against):

- Dan will be doing the 64-bit port as part of Alan's group at HP. That group also includes a bunch of Squeak heroes. - Since a 64-bit port inevitably brings us an image format change this will be version 4.0. - Of course this will also include most of the pending image format changes that have been talked about for 4.0.

There are also (at least) two other important new things banging on the Squeak front door:

- Yoshiki's m17n work - Anthony's work with full closures

The idea here is a rather aggressive parallell schedule in which the current community process continues with 3.8alpha/beta/gamma "business as usual" and we bring in m17n etc, and at the same time the V4 team with Dan in the lead prepares a migration process that at the end of the release cycle can be executed fairly simply to produce the 4.0 version from the 3.8 version.

This would then lead us to a simultaneous release of 3.8 (the last of version 3) and 4.0 (which should be identical in all but the image-format related areas) somewhere in june/july I think.

Just as an icing on the cake Craig Latta is also getting anxious to get a part of the action and expressed his intent to try to get the Squat work ready for production in time with 4.0 which could mean that a 4.0k (kernel) might also be released at the same time!

This was intended as a "short" announcement but turned lengthy. Dan will probably post shortly with more specifics, and I think Craig too etc. Anyone in the community that wants to participate more actively in these projects should of course not hesitate to contact Dan, Craig or any of us Guides.

Phew. It looks like a busy spring, doesn't it? But FUN! Hmmm, Itanium... well, how hard can an Opteron port be after that, eh?

regards, Göran

PS. Note how I managed to write this posting without any cheezy jokes about "The Return of The King" or "The Return of The Jedi" or... eh, darn.