Tweak mainstream in Squeak

Peter Crowther Peter at ozzard.org
Sat Jul 8 00:21:45 UTC 2006


> From: Martin Wirblat
> I think there are people who are interested in a system with 
> Tweak that is useable as an universal basis for:
> 
> - a personal desktop system.
> - deploying a desktop application. That implies that special hardware 
> should not be needed, that the resulting image is reasonably 
> small and 
> perhaps some flexibility in the UI look and feel.
> - server applications that are developed and run in an 
> UI-image but can 
> be shrunk down to a headless version if appropriate.
> - something else not covered directly by the above points but 
> imaginable 
> like e.g. a "browser-bootstrapped" application
> 
> Right now I guess there is some confusion or fear that you may target 
> only the personal desktop system like you do e.g. with Croquet.

Some questions, based on challenging some apparently pretty deep-seated
commitment biases observed on this list...

Why can what was previously known as Squeak not fork into:
- something that still carries the Squeak name,
- something that carries a new name such as Tweak, or Spoon?

Squeak has de-facto forked at least three ways; should we do anything
about it?  If so, what?

Why should the people described above (who want a universal system)
choose to use or evaluate Tweak now, rather than evaluating it later
when they have some evidence that it does / does not do what they want?
In other words: given the de-facto fork, why should people not evaluate
each prong of the fork on its own merits?

The maintainer(s) of a fork presumably maintain it for a reason,
possibly developmental freedom.  Who has authority over a fork's
maintainer(s) to tell them to merge with another prong of the fork?

Is any fork "more important" than any other?  For example, for those who
want a merged image, why not synchronise Squeak into a pre-existing
Tweak image, rather than Tweak into a pre-existing Squeak image?

I'll be fascinated to see whether these questions generate heat, light
or nothing :-).

		- Peter



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