[squeak-dev] Subcommunities and forks

Matthew Fulmer tapplek at gmail.com
Wed Jul 9 08:11:09 UTC 2008


On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 09:51:01AM +0200, Klaus D. Witzel wrote:
> If you promise to not take it personal: this is a question I often hear in  
> the marketing department: why do people click the old stuff when their  
> answers in the survey clearly point to the new stuff. Response from the  
> WWW guy: these are most likely different (sub-)communities and we have no  
> technical tools for relating individual downloaders with individual survey  
> participants. Have a tool?

This is very true. This community is trying to go many different
directions at once, but instead of give each subgroup a vehicle
to go further faster, we put them in one huge room (squeak.org).
This is why I think forks are very important for the community:
give each subgroup the perfect tool for their task. Want a lean
mean seaside developing machine? Pharo is the fork for you. Need
to have a great experience building presentations with squeak?
use etoys. Need to get a package as widely distributed as
possible? LPF can help with that. Wanna just see what's
available? FunSqueak is what you want.

That mostly leaves squeak.org with blue-plane researchers, who
mostly need a kernel image that they can build anything on.

Identifying sub-communities and giving them an optimized squeak
for their needs will help us stop bickering about what should or
should not be in the squeak.org release, because, really, there
is no image that will satisfy everybody. However, there are only
a dozen or so sub-communities striving to emerge, and each will
be quite happy with one or two images with the average of what
the members of that subcommunity want.

-- 
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/



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