Very bad about Squeak in blogosfere

stephane ducasse stephane.ducasse at free.fr
Sun Aug 12 13:17:45 UTC 2007


Hi Andreas,

You cannot say that there is no intention to harvest changes and  
reunite forks. Look at what we did in 3.9.
Now of course you can say what you want but you cannot expect the  
harvesters to look into croquet code
and bring that fixes into 3.xx. So please do not bend too much the  
reality. We harvested and integrated as much
as bug fixes as we can in 3.9 and I think that the result is good.

Now if you document the code that can be harvested I'm sure people  
will take care of that.
The problem is that in the past you were shouting when we touched (we  
are idiots anyway) packages you maintained
such as graphics, so this is why I never dare to include your fonts  
fixes in 3.9. I was fed up to be bashed on regular schedule.
I think that bashing people was not really productive at the end.

Now let us be positive.
	- I would be interested to find a way and contribute to help fixing  
the situation
	ie bringing more tests, bringing the community together.
	- May be building task forces to fix what can be fixed.
	- using the squeakfoundation to collect money to improve the situation.
	
But first if people like you do not care about mentioning what is  
fixed what can the other do?
I bet that if you would put a list of croquet fixes then people would  
look at them. May be this is a task for 3.11.

Stef

> Colin Putney wrote:
>> It's stated a bit harshly, but yeah, that sounds basically  
>> accurate. The amazing thing is that, in spite of all that, Squeak  
>> is still such a wonderful platform to work with. I do use Squeak  
>> in production, and there are very few things I would trade it for.
>
> Well, yes, but you can't deny that the guy's got a point. The  
> frustration he's expressing is something that everyone has felt  
> over the years. And while there are various plain invalid points in  
> his post (like the fact that Squeak has bugs - I'm *shocked* to  
> hear that of course and would have never started three products if  
> I'd known that ;-) the main emerging point is valid: The lack of  
> quality and maintenance. The problems he cites are all known, some  
> of them even have fixes but there isn't enough traction in the  
> community to make this all come together. And of course the forks  
> don't exactly help because we still haven't figured out how to  
> share code across the forks and consequently we have left numerous  
> folks behind in the last versions (3.7: all those people who don't  
> want m17n; 3.8: all those people who don't want traits) and  
> absolutely no way (and interest) in re-integrating those forks. And  
> as a result, you'll have the effect that Croquet has tons of bugs  
> fixed but nobody knows it (because I don't care about peddling the  
> goods). And I'm pretty sure the same goes for Sophie or Seaside or  
> OLPC or any other serious project.
>
> Leveraging those projects is what Squeak.org today is really,  
> REALLY terrible at. But it is where the majority of Squeak  
> production code gets written so if you want to get those fixes and  
> enhancements that happen in these projects you need to find a ways  
> of integrating them.
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
>
>
>




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