Hi again!

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?St=E9phane_Rollandin?= <lecteur at zogotounga.net> wrote:
> goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:
> 
> 1)
> > - Most of us aren't working full time on this. Or rather almost noone
> > is. This means NOONE owes NOTHING to ANYONE. Ok?
> 
> 2)
> > - Development follows a simple rule: If there is a Squeaker interested
> > in something it gets worked at. Period. No, I said PERIOD.
> 
> 3)
> > - And what happens when package X isn't being maintained properly and
> > someone is sad about it?
> > 
> > Answer: It bloody rots. But *so what*? If noone is prepared to maintain
> > it then obviously noone cares. Let it rot I say! Bah! :)
> > 
> 
> just one thought:
> 
> it could be that because of 1) and 2), all packages can not be updated 
> frequently enough for 3) to be true. it may be that people care but 
> cannot follow the rate of changes. if a lot of people work at the same 
> time, although they work slowly the overall system moves very fast (just 
> consider the traffic on this list)...and because people work slowly 
> things get broken along the way and eventually the system may fall in 
> pieces.

Nah... I of course don't hold all truths, but this is not really my
picture of the situation.
Squeak isn't moving THAT fast - in fact, most of Squeak is pretty
steady. When packages break they typically are very easy to fix, at
least that is my impression.

The illusion that Squeak is moving fast is also due to all the cool
packages that are moving fast - but those are built on top of Squeak and
aren't causing things to break.

So... it is not that people don't have the time to "keep up" - the fact
is rather that we are dragging along a lot of "dead code". Code that has
*no* active maintainer. Nor very many users.

> so the picture is not so nice I think. we may have a real problem here 
> if there is not some sort of centralized direction for Squeak 
> development, or at least common goals and strong guidelines. just having 
> fun may not be enough.

I strongly disagree with the analysis. :) That doesn't mean that we
could not use some more firm centralized direction of course - but
still, as I stated in my posting - Squeakers aren't working on stuff
because someone tells them to. We do it of on our own initiative. So
having someone telling the rest "what to do" or "where to go" would
simply not give us any results IMHO.

What we DO need though is better structure and better tools. Easier to
see who is doing what and how things affect each other. Better ways of
communicating and codeveloping. etc

> Stef

regards, Göran