On Jan 28, 2005, at 1:53 AM, goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:

> A few short reactions without blabbering:

A few short reactions from me too... :)

> 1. Regarding keeping up with all the work (harvesting primarily). Yes,
> Cees is right. Packaging, packaging. This is TFNR all over, and we
> really need to move forward with that. It is nice to see that more and
> more people are getting convinced. I would love if someone could step
> forward and say "Hey, Göran? I believe in that and I am willing to take
> charge of it for the moment - what should I do?". Then we could "just 
> do
> it". At the moment I am still swamped, and when I do get time I think 
> SM
> deserves it first anyway.

Yes, harvesting and the update stream(s) have been somewhat dead in the 
last couple of months.  I have also been swamped with work and haven't 
been contributing much to Squeak lately, which I feel sort of bad 
about, but we need to improve our development process so that it 
doesn't rely too much on any one person.  (And I will probably be back 
doing more Squeaky stuff in a month or so.)

One relatively easy move in that direction would be to simply open the 
update stream to a larger number of people, say, anyone who has Master 
status on Squeak People, which would be 19 people.  Plus maybe a few 
hardworking Journeyer people.  Also start using the unstable stream 
consistently, and regularly move batches over to the stable stream, 
which is easy.

Yes, packaging, packaging. :)  I started to write a lost post about 
packaging a couple of weeks ago, and then realized the issue wasn't as 
simple as I had thought, while writing it.

Anyway, it sure seems like it shouldn't be impossible to start dividing 
the base image into its remaining big chunks by using PackageInfo.  
Don't bother actually removing code from the image yet, just assign all 
the code to packages via the update stream.  (Basically via doits which 
assign existing code to packages.)  Keep the packages very 
coarse-grained at first, e.g. Morphic, MVC, Graphics, Kernel.  (The 
existing Class Categories are too fine-grained.  We'd just have a 
global list of PackageInfo instances to define the packages, right?  
Shouldn't any PackageInfo instance be able to "unload" itself, also?  
Not necessarily successfully, of course. :-) )

Then continually refine which code (especially method extensions) is in 
which package via the update stream.  The package concept would need to 
be more pervasive in the UI, in browsers, etc.  Later on, the packages 
could be put on SqueakMap.  (And then you start to really need some 
sort of dependency mechanism, but IMHO it's not critical to have while 
doing the initial splitting.)

I suppose this is probably what the TFNR project was trying to do, more 
or less.  But maybe we could just get it started now with the update 
stream.  Sorry, this is mostly brainstorming, I don't think I will be 
able to lead the packaging effort itself.

> 2. Regarding moving squeak.org. Move it before or after we have a plan
> of how to improve it? Again, I must say I am with Cees - move it first.
> Then we have the freedom to improve it. If nothing happens, so what.
> Btw, my HomepageBuilder stuff has evolved further and has Swiki like
> capabilities while it still looks like a regular website. We could
> perhaps use that.

Moving squeak.org didn't seem necessary to me at first, but I think 
you're probably right, that it will be more likely worked on if it is 
moved.  Mostly, it needs a single person to take on the role of lead 
maintainer of the content.  (The download page is in pretty decent 
shape now, mostly the other pages need work.  Most seriously, having an 
"About" section called "Entering 2000" is really REALLY bad and needs 
to be removed.)

> 3. Regarding money. I don't think money either solves the issue or is
> available. :) But we *do* have some money in the PayPal account that
> Cees set up and we currently use it to pay for the new virtual server.
> It is at least a start. And we have a server that *we* own. Currently 
> I,
> Ken Causey and Cees are messing with it. I am just about to add a
> remote-backup facility and BFAV has AFAIK already moved over to it. SM
> will move too.

I agree that a model of paying people probably won't work for actual 
Squeak development.  But money is definitely good for paying for things 
like the squeakfoundation servers, backup servers, Squeak CDs, and 
maybe even things like "bounties".

- Doug