These are *excellent* thoughts. Perhaps we can get a bit more clarity by 
summarizing the answers to the following questions (apologies if this 
amounts to repeating things that have been said many times before):

1. What is the current status of 3.11 - has work on it "officially" 
started? (yes/no/dunno are all fine answers here; I'm trying to 
establish the basics in terms of where in the process we are)

2. What are the goals for 3.11? I have seen references to 
http://installer.pbwiki.com/311 - is this "the place" for it? (again 
yes/no/perhaps are all good answers, I just want to make sure we're 
using the same frame of reference)

3. Where are we in the process towards these goals? Both from a 
high-level perspective as well as the nitty-gritty details of things 
that don't work but need to be addressed for a release.

4. How does one best track progress for 3.11? Is there an update stream? 
Are there Monticello releases? Mantis entries? Installer scripts? Alpha 
images? All of them?

5. How does one best contribute to 3.11? (both, for more long-term 
continued development as well as the ten-minute scratch-an-itch kind of 
exercise)

I think that maybe one of our problems here is that we lost a little 
track of what exactly the goals for 3.11 are and where we're in the 
process relative to those and I think get some clarity on that might 
help for future steps.

Cheers,
   - Andreas


Jerome Peace wrote:
> The useful part of Edgar's point was that the 3.11 folder on the ftp site sits empty.
> 
> I personally do not want to have to understand what is on the pbwiki or to navigate keith's new ways of doing things in order to play and test out a new squeak image.
> 
> What unsettles me at the moment is that two very powerful programmers are taking 3.11 in some very new directions relative to what the community is used to.
> 
> While I have a great respect in Matthew's judgment and ability to explain what he is doing, I have found from experience that Keith's notions are more of a gamble.
> 
> Keith is a gatekeeper for ideas from other communities like Ruby. He is powerfully fast. And he is focused on core changes that bring with them a lot of power and ease. 
> 
> On the other hand, I am afraid I have a great trouble trying to wade into his explanations. They get (for me) too technical, too quickly. They leave me scratching my head as to what the big simple picture is all about. So I am left with no easy way of understanding or judging his work. That in itself makes me uneasy.
> 
> He and I have discussed this in private via emails.
> 
> My other concern about this release is that it is actually a development project. The code is being written concurrent with the release. Andreas made a suggestion that each release should harvest what is already available in order to reduce risk. The plan for this release (and the talents of the release team) seem to be more state-of-the-not-quite-invented-art. This is a risk to the stability and timeline of the release.
> 
> 3.9 took two years and was release with so much stuff, integration bugs were almost assured. Users ran into some good ones.
> 
> 3.10.2 took a year even though it was modest in scope. It too was released with some very obvious bugs that hadn't been in 3.9. The main learning that came out of it was how brittle a release became when it was dependent on MC for development.
> 
> The current 3.11 release is an effort to find a viable way to maintain a release again. But where is the project now? And where are the (understandable) artifacts?
> 
> As a bug tracker, my experience warns me of trouble when big steps are taken w/o feedback. So I am wondering if Edgar's point can't be addressed.
> Could we get an alpha image of the current stable and unstable versions of 3.11 onto the ftp site?
> 
> This would serve as a check on backward compatibility and usability for 3.11. And give the rest of us something to do.
> 
> Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace
> 
> 
>       
> 
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