Hi Avi!

Avi Bryant <avi at beta4.com> wrote:
> On Jul 15, 2004, at 6:22 AM, goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:
> 
> > - Does the community want me to continue my work on SM? If the answer 
> > is
> > no, I will drop it immediately, I don't have time to waste on a dead
> > project.
> 
> Please, please continue it.  With all due respect to Craig: it would be 
> madness to stop working on a successful piece of Squeak infrastructure 
> that we've all come to rely on, simply because somebody thinks that 
> they may have a better alternative ready at some unspecified point in 
> the future.  Slate is very promising, for example, but we haven't all 
> given up on Squeak just because Brian's working on it.

Yes.
 
> > - If the answer is yes, is it fair of me to ask people to collaborate
> > with me on how SM works and how it should evolve instead of people
> > building replacements?
> 
> To turn your question around: I don't think it's fair to ask that 
> nobody work on building replacements.  Sometimes visions and goals are 
> too different for collaboration to work.  That's their prerogative, and 
> if they come out with a real competitor to SM, the community will 
> benefit in the long run.  The community will *not* benefit from SM 
> disappearing at the first sign of competition.

Right. Well, of course I can't ask people to NOT work on replacements.

I would however like to know that a larger part of the community think
that SM *can* evolve into the future and is *not* considered to be some
transitional thing. And that they *want* to help out.

> I also think it's fair to ask that those who *do* share your vision 
> closely enough that they can reasonably collaborate on SM, do so.  But 
> that won't include everyone.  That's how it goes.

Yes - and again - if anyone is interested, email me. Avi, you have
already helped quite a bit. So has Ned and Brian and several others in
pieces here and there. But noone has stepped up as an interested
co-maintainer. Hint, hint. :)

[SNIP]
> > So... I want a smart Smalltalk diff/patch but for *objects* and not 
> > Strings. Anyone up to the task?
> 
> Colin has already pointed out that diffing objects is, in the general 
> case, very hard, and that he's working on tree diffing.  I'm pretty 
> certain that the SM model could be squeezed into an appropriate tree 
> for his Difference Engine to work with it.  In fact, the model is 
> probably simple enough that we could support it with the current 
> version of Monticello: people could load/commit/merge versions of the 
> map (the data, not the code) using a special set of MCDefinition 
> subclasses.  It would take a reasonable amount of work, but would 
> certainly be doable.

Also interesting to hear. Hmm.

> > Hmmmm... I might have an idea how to do this in a simple way... Well, 
> > that is another posting alltogether. :)
> 
> Eager to hear it :).

Need to think it through first. :) It is a hackish but possibly viable
way.
Though using Monticello is also a very interesting path.
 
> Avi

regards, Göran