Bill Schwab wrote:
> No argument there, but some of us do things that require meeting
> expectations imposed from the outside.  To be blunt, I'd expect you
> would be glad we would like to do it using Squeak.

Absolutely. However ...

> At the risk of sounding a bit hostile, Jim Benson "put some damn effort
> into it" and was treated horribly IMHO.  I know it is not a popular
> statement (or at least it wasn't the last time I pointed it out), but
> there is still a glass ceiling in terms of affecting Squeak.  If you
> want people to "put some damn effort" into Squeak, the leaders needs to
> "put some damn effort" into reviewing their work.  Reject it if you
> will, but do not ignore it.

... the "mainstream" cannot necessarily cater to every subgroup. In 
Jim's case it was pretty clear that this is work that will be 
interesting for a particular subgroup of the community - people who need 
100% Windows looking apps. Jim did a *great* job at this but the simple 
fact of the matter is that Squeak community is roughly 30/30/30 between 
Windows, Mac, Unix and only a subset of the 30% windows users really 
wants Windows looking apps. Meaning that Zurgle might be interesting for 
(probably less than) 10% of the overall users of Squeak. Personally, I 
don't see how Jim could have been treated "less horribly" other than the 
people who care about the native looking stuff to pick it up and help 
him. That he didn't get much support -to me- is a clear sign that the 
percentage of people who want Windows look is a lot less than 10%.

BTW, I totally understand that this is a circular argument. Squeak is 
cross-platform which means that a Windows look will never become 
"standard" which means Squeak will not attract Windows programmers etc. 
But that's just what Squeak is, we made it that way. And of course we 
could change it, but then I wouldn't use it.

> Please note that I am very comfortable with folks like Andreas having
> far more influence than newcomers.  I also do not believe there is a
> conscious effort to exclude new ideas.  However, there appears to be no
> need to review and close submissions, so they get ignored vs. rejected
> with an explanation.  I suspect that many things that have been ignored
> would be much harder to actively reject with a reason.

I don't think so. I think you're getting confused by the absence of any 
visible policy for inclusion into the image. It is hard to guess from 
the grab-bags of stuff that get included why exactly those things ended 
up in the image and why not others. Personally, I feel that about the 
*only* thing that had a right to get into the image in the last three 
Squeak versions was the m17n support. Everything else should have been 
loadable via SqueakMap. And (again personally speaking) I would have had 
no problem to actively reject all these other things merely based on the 
fact that they're not critical and that they should prove their weight 
in package form after which someone might bring forward an argument why 
the inclusion is critical.

Cheers,
   - Andreas