Thanks for responding Michael. You may as well have read my mind.
I will, however, address the same points in roughly the same order.

I must apologize for not being more communicative. I have had
other activities that demanded my attention. I am truly sorry.

I recall a picture from my childhood of the "language tree". It
was gnarly and had funny shoots... like the Finno-Ugric languages.
I would hope that Squeak will develop its own branches. Perhaps a
foundation could help archive, explore and nourish this tree.
We can embrace variety and come away richer.

Since this branch is favoring simplicity over features, it is
smaller and simpler. Mainline Squeak can benefit immediately
from the unit tests we have written. Over time SqC can incorporate
our base changes, or come up with better solutions that address
the same issues. In any event, the long term goal is to incorporate
more and more of the base image functionality in the Squeak world
tour environment as loadable source code. It will always lag
the base in feature set. It may even support other experimental
interface projects. Our points of view are the principle
limiting factors. The goals of the Squeak world tour and SqC
are different, but they are more complementary than conflicting.
There is an interesting dynamic tension between production coding
values and the values of experimental development. Both are crucial.
I expect the development of each to be a co-evolution.

Why should you expect more openness in the future? Because,
the Squeak world tour has reached the stage of an initial release.
Every effort is being made to avoid licensing issues and I have
erred on the side of caution. This is in the final round of
validation.

Hopefully it will spawn a flurry of forks when it is released.
We hope to facilitate moving functionality between forks in
the code base.


[|] John Sarkela 

Man ist vas er isst. ;-}> See you in Essen.

> From: Michael Rueger <m.rueger at acm.org>
> Reply-To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 08:55:01 -0700
> To: Squeak <squeak at cs.uiuc.edu>
> Subject: Re: Stable Squeak?
> Resent-From: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Resent-Date: 18 Apr 2001 15:55:57 -0000
> 
> 
> 
> Andreas Kuckartz wrote:
> 
>> I still do not see a need for a project fork which is not even prepared
>> openly.
> I agree with you that the work could have been more publicized, but...
> The whole idea of Squeak is to encourage everyone to do whatever they
> want. Interestingly both Alan Kay and Dave Thomas actually encouraged
> people to do this in their keynotes at SmalltalkSolutions.
> Standardization is stagnation, and we already have enough systems that
> are standardized, haven't we? ;-)
> 
>> Which of these features are incompatible with the aims of SqC ?
> Actually none. And stable Squeak is not intended to be incompatible, the
> idea (John correct me if I put this wrong) is to take a breath, take a
> very close look at the system and work out some issues like modularity,
> refactoring, cleanup of historically "grown" code that later will
> benefit the "mainstream" Squeak tremendously.
> 
>> Why should I expect more openness in the future?
> Be patient just a little while longer.
> And, the world tour is coming almost to your home town in August (ESUG
> in Essen), for LA that would be considered walking distance (except
> nobody would walk here ;-) ).
> 
> Michael
> 
> 
> -- 
> "To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often."
> Winston Churchill
> +------------------------------------------------------------+
> | Michael Rueger    m.rueger at acm.org      ++1 (310) 937 7196 |
> +------------------------------------------------------------+
>