Hi!

Just wanted to mention a few other noteworthy aspects:

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?st=E9phane_ducasse?= <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
> Quite easy.
> 
> There were a lot of discussions about the need of packages.
> The stableSqueak effort developed fork with a meta-model that  
> supported packages (a bit more advanced
> than the one underlying MC but the tool were not really mainstream  
> and merging, diff were missing.
> Joseph Perline an Envy and Smalltalk guru succeeded to pissed of a  
> lopt of people by calling them Sunday programmers :)

The main problem with StableSqueak was that it was a
hang-on-we-will-write-this-and-it-will-be-super-just-wait-and-see-and-no
-you-can't-join-us-at-this-time-project. No offense intended, the
project just didn't tap into the community and it didn't have the muscle
to pull it all off by itself.

> In the same time, Henryk proposed a new package system that was a  
> kind of changeset based. I asked alex which was started
> his PhD to help henryk, all the guys from berne (me, roel, nathanael,  
> alex, and andrew visiting on sabbatical) tried hard to understand
> the package model of henryk. We invited him to visit us so that we  
> could understand the model. We failed, a lot of questions
> remained not answered. Still dan boldy pushed the work on henryk  
> because the community wanted into squeak 3.3alpha.
> We continued to try to understand, andreas wrote a package browser....
> But nobody was using 3.3alpha, six months later I asked that we  
> realized that its was a failure, therefore SqC removed
> the modules code from the stream. Henryk was mad and telling that I  
> was a troll....(even if he slept at my place when visiting us)
> and he vanished.

Another aspect with 3.3modules was that it was "a hard place to live
in". Squeak is image based - and if the image suddenly becomes
uncomfortable for people, they don't tend to work in it and instead stay
behind in an older version (3.2 in this case). So 3.3 never attracted
enough eyes anyway.

And yes, the model probably had some issues - but I do recall that
Henrik (with an i) wrote quite a bit of solid code for handling
repositories for example. Unfortunately it all went into the bitbucket.

regards, Göran