Peter Smet wrote:
> 
> Josh,
> 
> You have raised a good point here. In theory, if you post it to this group,
> labelled [ENH] in the subject line, then it will be considered for future
> incorporation by the Squeak team at Disney. That's the theory. In practise,
> there appear to be a lot of change sets just rotting in the electronic
> hinterland. A while ago, I changed atRandom to get rid of some duplicate
> code - it was a small change, but I am convinced the change was better
> factored than the original (which STILL has the duplicated code). I posted
> the change, but it just atrophied somewhere. A similar thing happened when I
> found a bug in collection with: do: if the collections were uneven sizes.
> 
> If we are to encourage people like yourself and others to contribute to
> Squeak, we must give them immediate feedback - yes, this will go into the
> image, yes it will go into an add-on package, or no, it has the following
> problems. This just doesnt happen, but IMO it is important that it should. A
> good example is the improvements to the Date class Alan L recently posted.
> These appear to fix some problems in Date, but I nor anyone else has any
> idea what is going to happen to this code. Similarly, I have dropped many
> hints that the exception framework of Craig Latta should be incorporated
> into the base image. This framework, as well as an improvement in compiled
> method have been around for months, but many people are not aware of them
> because they have not been incorporated.
> 
> What's worse is that the Disney team have their own internal update stream
> that we are not privy to. Recently, this resulted in a lot of duplicated
> effort by people on the list, fixing a bug that was already well and truly
> fixed. Now I realise that the Disney team are probaby working flat out on
> Squeak etc, but I strongly feel that there should be a WEEKLY post informing
> everyone of all the new changesets that have been accepted and rejected into
> the base image. After all, cooperation isn't going to happen if people don't
> get some kind of feedback.
> 
> Peter
> 

There now seems to be a large enough base of users outside Disney that could
cooperate to form a development group to design and maintain a parallel version
of Squeak (Squawk?) and respond to the growing needs of its growing audience. 

I think this is necessary and volunteer be a part of such a group.

Shall we begin to organize a group on the Squeak swiki? What do the veteran
Squeakers think?

-Mark Schwenk
 WellThot Inc.