Some questions about Spoon

Craig Latta craig at netjam.org
Wed Aug 9 21:51:45 UTC 2006


Hi Stef--

> I'm surprised not to see development discussion on this mailing-list
> except craig reports. Do you use another way of communicating?

	We communicate by direct email, telephone, IM, and the Squeak IRC
channel, whichever is most convenient and effective at the moment.

> Then how do you share code and enh do you have a repository?

	That's one of the things we're building. :)  At the moment, I use
entire object memories. So far I haven't made my personal object memory
available with every snapshot, because it has things in it for other
projects, and I'd prefer not to share them with the world yet. This is
annoying, of course, and one of the strong motivations I have for making
Smalltalk modular. (I am thinking of just making my snapshots available
all the time anyway, though.)

	Also, we're working on fairly distinct (and large) tasks. Brenda Larcom
is working on a version of Flow (Spoon's initial networking framework)
which is backward-compatible with earlier versions of Squeak. Matt
Hamrick is designing security measures for Spoon. John Dougan is
interested in making the virtual machine smaller. Simon Michael, Byron
Ellis, Duncan Mak, and Ken Causey have helped test the object memory
releases (this is how we found problems with CPU usage in 1a12, for
example).

	(If any of the above people are no longer working on those tasks, or
have more to add, please do chime in. The above is my current
understanding.)

	Anyway, so far the active tasks have been very large, with relatively
infrequent releases. I know this goes against the grain of a typical
open-source project, but it's also part of the nature of a large
bootstrapping effort.

	I encourage anyone who is interested in participating to ask "what can
I do?" rather than wait for a lot of talk. We're spending our effort
making progress, so that we'll have something meaningful to say when we
do talk. :)

	The most helpful thing a newcomer to Spoon can do right now is download
the most recent release[1], play with it, ask questions about how it
works, and suggest improvements in the design (here on the mailing list :).


	thanks,

-C

[1] http://ftp.squeak.org/Spoon/spoon1a12.zip

-- 
Craig Latta
http://netjam.org/resume




More information about the Spoon mailing list