Hi!

Yoshiki Ohshima <yoshiki at squeakland.org> wrote:
>   Hello,
> 
>   Lex posted this bug report:
> 
> http://bugs.impara.de/view.php?id=942
> 
> And it seems that there is something like "a fresh 3.9, updated to
> patch 6599."  So... What is it anyway?  Updated from one of these in
> ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/Smalltalk/Squeak/3.9/?
> 
>   Appearently, one thing that works in 3.8 gamma 6599 doesn't quite
> work in that version (maybe it is not too big difference, I hope).

Eh... well, I use:
ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/Smalltalk/Squeak/3.9/Squeak3.9a-6548.zip

and then update that from the public stream. That ends me up at 6599. I
am not terribly sure what 3.9 has compared to current 3.8, but I was
under the impression that it mainly has Diego's UI stuff.

> Also, in squeak-package, squeak-modules, and other mailing lists,
> there are many discussions about major changes toward 3.9.

Some clarifications:
	- The Modules Team is most certainly not producing anything for 3.9,
possibly for 4.0 (following 3.9).
	- The Packages Team on the other hand is focused on making its work be
one of the important parts of 3.9.
 	- And Doug has just formed a v3.9 Team that he is leading, so specific
questions about that release should be answered by Doug.

	See: http://discuss.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?13

>   So, here is my question: are people going to start the "3.9 work"
> from the coming 3.8 release, which I think I did my part, or from one
> of these versions?

I am referring you to Doug. The Packages Team and the ToolBuilder Team
are the two teams that will be producing results aimed for the 3.9
stream. The Packages Team which I follow closely hasn't decided yet if
we are first working in a separate stream or if we will be working
directly in the 3.9 stream (which I would prefer, but Avi is the
leader).

>   Toward 3.9, many things will break (hopefully for a limited time).
> But I don't think it is a good idea to start from something already
> known to be unstable.

Well, I can't answer this. I assume we either use 3.9 as it stands or we
could take 3.8 and reapply the few updates that have went into 3.9, I
don't know. What is the instability you are referring to? Again, Doug's
ball. :)

>   For that matter, does anybody think it is a good idea to have a
> version something like 3.8.1, in which we only fix the bugs, but don't
> add new features?  The way we make new release (not only 3.8 but most
> of former versions) has been that we add many last minute changes
> toward new release, and not quite put much effort to stabilize things.
> And people tend not to jump to a beta or gamma version.  "A release,
> and a bug fix release" is a way to overcome this problem.  (Nihongo6
> had some rough edges. We released Nihongo6.1 to fix the problems and
> it worked very well.)

This is actually exactly the way we intend to do it for 3.8. We have
even tweaked the code for loading updates on startup so that "newbies"
starting Squeak for the first time will be politely asked to load any
post release fixes.

>   It is too late to advocate this idea, but we could name such thing
> 3.9 and all the "major" changes can go into new major version.  (And,
> in this case, we should keep both version "alive".)

Eh, no, let us not confuse things more than they are. :) This is what we
have now:

3.8 (to be released any day now)

3.8.x (x being upped by 1 for every fix I think, not sure)

3.9 (this is scheduled for june and will include:
	- ToolBuilder
	- Result of the Packages team which mainly will be a partitioning of
the image. This is a very important step forward.
	- A bunch of other good things which have been discussed in the "Stefs
roadmap" thread.
	- Possibly Traits (*possibly* - first we need a good beta (work is
being done) and we also need to contact stakeholder communities etc,
since this is an important change)

4.0	Stream opens sometime in june and the first thing to go in will be
the result of the MorphicSplitters team. The plan for 4.0 is otherwise
not known.

> -- Yoshiki

regards, Göran