Hello,
The last days I am thinking about lots of things in Smalltalk, Smalltalk
communities, Smalltalk development environments, ... You could call this an
existential problem, only that it has to do with Smalltalk, and not so much
with my 'inner self'.

It's not that I am posing questions whether or not to keep on using
Smalltalk. Quite the contrary: I have been using it for 8 or 9 years now,
and its conceptual beauty still strikes me regularly. So, the question is
not whether or not to keep on using Smalltalk, but what to do with it.

Personally, what I typically end up doing is to clean up parts of it. Every
time I have to implement something, I sooner or later end up making bigger
or smaller refactorings in the System itself (as well as in my code of
course). While this pleases me enormously (it makes it far more conceptually
esthetic), I never know what to do with these changes afterwards. Sometimes
I send them to the list here, but they are not included with the base
release. Note that this is no remark whatsoever against Squeak central (they
already do a terrific job, for which I am very thankful); I completely
understand that they have other goals and do not have the manpower to try
and integrate such changes. However, the net result is that these
'ameliorations/refactorings/...' are forgotten over time.

After discussing with Stephane Ducasse (my colleague here in Bern), he
created the Swiki pages to note these kinds of things. And we are in contact
with John Sarkela to add to the Stable Squeak effort. But still...

Is there anything that can be done ? Am I just to overly aesthetic ? Did I
overlook a special prefix that I can use to send this kinds of things in the
mailing list ? Do they have a chance to be included if I make them for the
latest Squeak versions ? Etc etc etc

--
Roel Wuyts                           Software Composition Group
Roel.Wuyts at iam.unibe.ch         University of Bern, Switzerland
Board member of the European Smalltalk User Group: www.esug.org