Beta late than never

Dan Ingalls Dan.Ingalls at disney.com
Mon May 15 17:41:02 UTC 2000


Folks -

First of all I want to acknowledge your courteous patience with regard to the release of Squeak 2.8.  We have had a lot to do and it seemed better to wait until the soup is done than to rush things.

I would like to declare a selfish beta status now or very soon (write to me if you have something you specially care about).  "Beta" to us means:  no more sweeping rewrites, and not too many more enhancements from now until we can take 2.8 final.  "Selfish" means that we at Squeak Central still have a couple of large changes to include.  We would just like the luxury of bringing these in with as little outside perturbation as possible so that we can test things and get 2.8 out as quickly and simply as possible.

That said, we still have about 15 updates from the Squeak list in the pipeline that I'll try to issue today or tomorrow and, as I said, we'll still consider any reasonable requests.

Thanks
	- Dan

PS:  Speaking of sweeping rewrites, I know you are all aware of Richard Harmon's work on ANSI compatibility.  Stefan has expressed an interest in passing over that body of code in an attempt to also maximize backward compatibility with Squeak.  I think this is worth a shot, and we have talked about trying this out early in the 2.9alpha stage.  It might still require a fileIn for rigorous ANSI compliance, but if we could go 80-90% of the way in the base image, it would surely improve compatibility with other Smalltalks while also saving the bulk of Richard's work from getting more out of date with every future release.






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