Andreas Raab a écrit :
> Hi Stef -
> 
> I have a few comments on your roadmap, some from a general point of view 
> and some from a specific point of view. I'll give you the general points 
> first. When I read your roadmap, it becomes clear that your major goal 
> is to transform Squeak into something that you can do systems research 
> in. Your priorities show this clearly - from MC in the base image, over 
> RB, traits, new compiler, system dictionary refactoring is everything 
> aimed at defining a playground for systems and software engineering 
> research. There is nothing wrong with this particular direction but 
> *please* keep in mind that there are other interests in the Squeak 
> community besides yours and that people with other interests have other 
> priorities. Most importantly for those "other" people is stability of 
> the base system.

Stability concerns are important for all of us.
I think that the proposed modifications will also benefit others Squeak 
concerns, for example having a new parser also helps Etoys.
The idea i guess is not doing modifications only for software 
engineering research but also to enhance the stability and the 
flexibility of the overall system. And we should trust the "software 
engineering" guys for doing something better in this area.

> During the SqC days we have often heard the complaint that Squeak 
> develops to rapidly, but none of that evolution was even remotely as 
> deep and as intrusive as you are proposing now and have been in the last 
> two or three Squeak versions. Code that I have been running quite 
> literally for years broke in 3.7, then again in 3.8 for extremely 
> obscure side-effects of some so-called "cleaning". You and collegues 
> need to understand that this represents a major problem for users of 
> Squeak. And while some breakage is acceptable and expected in new 
> versions there should be significant advantages for users in exchange 
> for these breakages (say, like the m17n changes which broke a whole 
> bunch of stuff at the advantage of being able to use international 
> scripts). And I think that being able to do research in software 
> engineering is generally NOT considered a significant advantage for 
> those users.
> 
> It is important that you understand this issue. When I looked at 3.8 for 
> porting Tweak to it I was seriously appalled by many of changes that 
> have crept into the system. Proliferation of base classes has become a 
> significant problem over the last versions and it won't get any better 
> with more extensions to the base image. Something that -in lack of a 
> better word- I will call "random reclassification" of methods (quite 
> honestly I do not see any difference in putting methods into 
> SystemDictionary vs. SmalltalkImage except that a) the name 
> SmalltalkImage sucks and b) you now have to guess which place to look 
> at) does not help to improve the situation. *Please* understand that 
> everytime you move a method which has been in a particular place for a 
> number of years you are potentially breaking dozens of packages. 
> *Please* try to understand that this is a major problem for anyone using 
> such methods.

So Andreas, if you didn't agree with this roadmap, what his your own 
proposition ? Doing nothing for the Squeak base is not a valid answer 
;-) Monticello should be the default way to manage and share code 
between developers and should be part of the core of Squeak.

I agree with you that maybe there is too much modification for just a 
release and maybe we can delay all these modifications in several releases.

Maybe we can have something similar to the Gentoo Linux distributions. 4 
releases for a year : 2004.0, 2004.1, 2004.2, 2004.3. Each release are 
timely plan and there is a release manager for each of them.
So more releases with less modifications.

--                                                         oooo
Dr. Serge Stinckwich                                     OOOOOOOO
Université de Caen>CNRS UMR 6072>GREYC>MAD               OOESUGOO
http://purl.org/net/SergeStinckwich                       oooooo
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]   \  /
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