Somebody needs to decide what is a release and what's get in there, and it was decided that these were the Guides. I trust them to do an excellent job at this, that is why they are responsible. I can imagine that there is some 'bigger plan' for which they want to have this release. The question for me is: 'what is this bigger plan'. If it is only that it was promised to have a new release by a certain time, then I agree with you that we can wait. But I guess the plan for 3.4 was to have SM up and running, and that is also important to get out so that everybody can enjoy it. Delaying this for one fix (that I find terribly annoying but many people probably not) when there is a good working update mechanism is probably not that bad.

PS: Personally I don't see a problem with Andreas' fix, and I would just include it if the tests run and look good (which they do). But then again there's also no problem in putting it in the update stream. Then you and me and other people will work with an updated 3.4: no big deal really.

On Friday, February 28, 2003, at 08:37 AM, Hannes Hirzel wrote:

Hi Doug

Doug Way dway@riskmetrics.com wrote:

...

Okay, I'm very easily talked out of delaying the 3.4 release any further :-) (and was having second thoughts after posting that last message), so I agree with the prevailing opinion to leave this change out and go ahead with the release.

Well of course you guides can do anything you want "releasing" things, i.e. putting a label on a jar and call it a "release". Not having a proper test culture in Squeak leads us to have this kind of funny discussions. Measuring risk just with a feeling in the guts? "I feel like releaseing... I'm scary of metaclasses ....people don't use them anyway...".

Releaseing something at the moment just means that enough new features have been added and the guides feel that people have not been complaining too much about new bugs. But there is no idea if a release is better then an old one on the existing stuff or not.

Be assured the first thing I will do after downloading your release is to include the fix of Andreas and already I will not work on your "release" anymore. And many of the list members will just do the same. For me 3.4 will be a "release" which is not proper Smalltalk (in the sense of the last 20 years) as it breaks

in a fundamental way without the fix by Andreas. He really has done an *excellent job*. And the test case he provided in just 30 minutes is wonderful! And the community is not able to verify his fix in 3 days ??

I wonder where this time pressure comes from? The 3.4 release was planned for the end of 2002. No we are two month later. So what? Are customers pressing somewhere? In fact that would be good. On the other side at least some customers do not want a buggy 3.4.

MS projects often get delayed much longer and with the .NET initiative (an approach with a VM as well!) they want to do it "right", even if that causes delays!

Again: where is the time pressure? There a good releases and others.

Regards Hannes Hirzel

P.S. On the other side this discussion about "releases" is in some sense a non issue as probably in the future we will have different configurations which will be packed for various target groups and automatically tested before releasing.

I could live with the idea of a buggy 3.4 if 3.5 for example is planned for doing in two months time. Then 3.4 would just be some kind of intermediary release.

P.S. 2 The heading speaks of "priorization". Where are the plans for future releases? Non-existant! Is there a check list what 3.4 should be? I didn't find it yet although as a member of the documentation team I had surfed a lot over the existing Squeak web pages and I was active at the mailing list.

You guides , please do your homework!

Roel Wuyts Software Composition Group roel.wuyts@iam.unibe.ch University of Bern, Switzerland http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~wuyts/ Board Member of the European Smalltalk User Group: www.esug.org