Hi Juan!

if anyone expects that he clearly never coded :))))))))))))))) You did a
hell of a job. To my naive eyes what is needed is not a volunteer for a
suicide mission, but rather some form of integration among the many (too
many?) images. The advantage VW clearly has is in having ONE stable base
with many options, here we have many a base, all with huge merits and none
with all the basic answers a simple developer needs.

In some way there is a strange "all by myself" approach, which is maybe
dictated by the fact that all of us have our own image, work on it until we
get really tired and eventually end up almost in insulation. In such a
situation we all address what is relevant "for us", we all do the best we
can but there seem to be little chances to integrate all this work into a
common stable distro.

Get me right, I'm not criticising people. I'm saying that the load of work
that is being done doesn't eventually add up to something that a first time
user perceives as "quality". This is something about the method, not about
the people. Yet in the end this thing pushes away potential coders that
could help in making things better.

I fell in love with Smalltalk back in the 90s, when there was but
VisualWorks around. I had loads of things I didn't like with VW, but I never
had to spend months checking the same 10 lines on the like of 30 different
images to see "which one makes a better luck". I have to do it with Squeak,
and I do it because I do want to write Smalltalk code again and I'm ready to
stand some pain in order to do it. If I had never written code in it I'd
have probably concluded that this is but a waste of time.

I'm not worried by the fact that I will have to stay up some more nights,
because I perfectly know that I'll do it anyway. In instead, I'm worried by
the fact that many people will get a wrong impression by their first
contact. And I'm sure this very worry was YOUR worry when you started CUIS.

CUIS is a wonderful distro, but today I had to inline a string of credits
for a guy who has an Irish name, and in order to do it I'll have to make a
chinese dance, because I cannot cut and paste his name into a string. Now go
and explain to a paying customer that you are two weeks late because you
cannot cut and paste a name... When Igor said this is just a toy I could
only agree. Because this is what people who try to sell Squeak are condemned
to hear over and over again, as long as these basic problems do not get
solved.

Once again, this does not mean that someone is lazy or stupid or an "enemy
of the people". It means that *maybe* there could be a way to share the load
of work you all do in a way that makes a better result with less effort. I
underline it, I said *maybe* and I'm not able to suggest a remedy here and
now. But surely talking about it in explicit terms can help to find such a
remedy, if any exists.

Berto

2009/4/16 Juan Vuletich <juan at jvuletich.org>

> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>
>> On 16.04.2009, at 09:24, Andreas Raab wrote:
>>
>>  Bčrto ėd Sčra wrote:
>>>
>>>> Yes. This thing is *extremely* annoying. You can cut and paste any
>>>> string to anything, but you cannot do it in squeak.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Really? I don't recall seeing a bug report from you. What platform are
>>> you on? What problems did you have? You really should report such problems
>>> when you have them - how do you expect us to fix problems that we don't know
>>> about?
>>>
>>
>>
>> Err, we know quite well about these problems. Typing unicode chars don't
>> work because the utf32 charcode is not used by the released image. To paste
>> unicode text on the Mac you would need the image support for the extendend
>> clipboard plugin. But even if typing or pasting works, the fonts only cover
>> the latin-1 range, not full unicode. Neither Freetype nor HostFonts nor
>> Pango support is in the released image, nor did we standardize on one.
>>
>> All of these issues have been solved already, but did not make it into a
>> release afaik.
>>
>> - Bert -
>>
>>  I hope all this works as an argument for considering Unicode optional in
> Cuis. Or does anybody expect that besides doing 5 years of cleaning towards
> a simpler and faster image, I also need to address all these issues myself?
>
> The whole idea of optional packages is to draw a boundary between the
> kernel and each of them, to allow different people to focus on different
> problems.
>
> Cheers,
> Juan Vuletich
>
>
>


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