I still think you are being too harsh.  At any rate, people are
successfully using Squeak for everything from toys to research to
products.  It's a fact.  So why don't we talk about how to do better,
instead of how to do tolerably?


Michael Latta <lattam at mac.com> wrote:
> 3) Citing applications that serve the Squeak community as evidence of 
> Squeak's production quality is not sufficient if your target is 
> end-users that do not care about Squeak and only care about getting 
> their work done.  There may be uses of swiki that fit this example, but 
> I suspect that swiki uses a small percentage of the code in the full 
> image.

Most Swikis are *not* used by Squeakers.  minnow has about 15 non-squeak
swikis and about 5 squeak ones, and that's the very server the Squeak
swiki is on.  swiki.cc.gatech.edu has 235 swikis, and by my quick
glance, *none* are related to Squeak itself.  All of these users don't
care about squeak and just want to get their work done.  Most of them
probably don't even know what the "s" in swiki stands for.


> Your last line is only true if what I want to do is what others have 
> wanted Squeak to do, and have invested the effort in fixing/finishing.  

Isn't that the nature of the beast?  Either you write it yoruself, or
you find code that someone else has had an interest in writing.  How
else are you going to get code?

Yes, there are a lot of things Squeak has, and a lot of things it
doesn't.  That is not a very deep observation, if you think about it...


> The 3.8 release is advertised as 
> supporting multi-lingual features, but the code is completely 
> uncommented, and I was unable to find external documentation, or get a 
> simple answer from the list on the level of support.

3.8 is still under development.  The multi-lingual stuff hasn't
been mixed in very well.  I haven't even switched over to 3.8
yet, and I'm a very heavy Squeak user!


> I compare this with other open source projects that have regular build 
> schedules,

Do we need this in Squeak?  What would be build, exactly?  I guess we
could re-install the packages automatically, and re-run the tests
automatically.


> code documentation and comments

Some code is documented, some not.  Just like in most projects.


> and bug tracking that is 
> clearly available from their website 

We have had just such a bug tracker for about 6 months.  It's linked
from the swiki, and is fairly quick to find.  It's not on squeak.org
yet, because that seems to get updated less frequently.


Overall, thanks for your ideas on improving Squeak.  Keep in mind,
though, that some of this stuff actually exists (like production code
and bug trackers), and some of it is not as important for us (like
regular builds).   On the other hand, there is surely plenty of stuff we
could steal from other groups, and any particulars you can point out are
great.

In addition, you might think about posting changesets instead of rants. 
If you a feature commented that does not work as advertised, then change
the comment and click "mail to list" in a change sorter.  Comment-only
changesets are one of the easiest ways to improve Squeak, and they do
get incorporated quickly.

Finally, do be sure to browse around the swiki.  It has over 5000 pages
of documentation.

Lex