Le 09-08-08 à 16:59, Keith Hodges a écrit :

> Lets take yourself...
>
> Have you contributed a fix to mantis, discussed it tested it in  
> several
> images? If so great, but have you? This was the mechanism for making
> small contributions in 3.10, and 3.11+ did you ever use it?

I don't speak for anybody, I speak for myself.
If you are a fish you are at ease in water, but I'm not a fish
so for every new tool someone introduce I must learn to use it.
As I'm not born in the fluid of Smalltalk, and as I learned by myself  
what I know
about Smalltalk, never saw a 'living' Smalltalker working infront of me,
I'm not always as confident as I should and so don't take too much  
place.
Add to this that I'm not a native english man so this doesn't help
to participate fully in a team.


> Have you taken a subsystem of squeak, and worked on it to produce a  
> new
> deliverable that can be used by users of Squeak 3.10, 3.9,3.8 Pharo  
> and
> cobalt and perhaps other images.
> Have you offered to join a team maintaining a significant part of
> squeak, or a significant subsystem?
> Have you written any significant loadable library for squeak?
> Have you even joined the release mailing list and offered your  
> services?
>
> For example, I took on the idea of replacing FileDirectory, and I have
> spent what now amounts to more than couple of years working on Rio,  
> as a
> replacement to FileDirectory. I also took on the idea of making
> Universes workable, and maintaining MC. All of these are contributions
> to the future of squeak that the"trunk" process has summarily  
> dismissed.

I know and agree that your contributions where and are important.

> Where is your contribution, for you to call it "our" process? If your
> name is not Bert, Matthew, Andreas, Igor, Nicholas Cellier, David  
> Lewis,
> or Edgar, then you probably do not pass the contributor test I  
> outlined
> above, and really you shouldnt even be involved in this conversation  
> at
> all until you have earned your stripes.

It seems to me that you reproduce what you reproach....
The number of time somebody went to tell other "if you don't  
post...you don't speak"
on this list, at different time, is simply too much...point.
Please don't forget that we are on the net...it is open...I mean "OPEN"
so we must go with it...

> If you think that joining Andreas hacking away in trunk is of any  
> use to
> anyone, then good luck to you. All I see coming for me is an enormous
> porting process looming over the horizon, and a wait of 2 years for  
> all
> the packages I am depending on to get around to updating to use it and
> so I will probably just stick with 3.10 for myself because no path of
> planned evolution is being defined. This kind of effort to generate  
> this
> kind of discontinuity would be far better targeted at Squeak 5.0/ 
> Spoon.
>
> The trunk is a pit of unmanaged, unplanned, haphazard activity that  
> has
> no thought behind it and is useless to the majority of current squeak
> users, and it continues to treat the image as a monolithic entity. We
> are back where we started in the hands of a privileged few people. It
> was the very fact that the community has reached a propensity to fork
> that was the signal to us that some new approach was needed.

I can tell you that I agree with some of what you say here...and also  
the automatic building process...but I think
that the blood whas not circulating anymore in the body so it was  
imperative
to reactivate it, and IMO the Trunk can slowly reactivate the blood  
circulation
of Squeak.
I expect that  we will collectively -- at "open" community pace --
  - define a path of evolution for Squeak
  - precise what the porting process will be
  - how to reintegrate some *caution here* aspects of other fork
  - how to rejoin together when possible...
I add to this one of my own view:

  - for the rest of us : I mean not only system developper, not only  
application developper but also user of Squeak.
I say this because differents forks used to be what I call  
"Specialised Fork" around applications (DabbleDB,Seaside),
around research team (Pharo), around refactoring (Cuis) etc... Also  
seeing users only on the side of Etoys is an error
there are users that use Squeak as a dayly toolset and who program in  
Squeak without building "Commercial applications".

User of Squeak have their place, and can speak. They are more than  
just (squeak-dev lurkers).
Are tell differently, they are squeak-dev lurkers at moment, depending  
of what is discussed on the table, or what they can
bring.


> As a result of events surrounding "the trunk" and its "management". I
> have decided to withdraw from making public contributions to squeak.

I understand your decision...but it is a lost from the community point  
of view.

> This decision has been made entirely due to the actions of the board,
> and the downright disrespectful behaviour of some of its members.  In
> particular no efforts were made to contact me in the 8 weeks preceding
> the announcement of this "new" (exactly the same mindset as before)
> process. Subsequently I have asked the board to discuss their terms of
> engagement, and since I have not had any sign of movement on this, I
> have had enough. I feel that way I have been treated is simply not
> acceptable.


> For others seeking to contribute to squeak, I think you should think
> very carefully about wasting your time in such a fragile and fickle
> community. What we have observed in the past few weeks is that the  
> whole
> regime can be turned on a sixpence, it is easily swayed by whatever is
> the next email that arrives in squeak-dev, on whatever topic any
> uninvolved newbie wants to wax lyrical about.

I recognise that it appears like that...

> I naively thought that the board was elected to provide a stabling
> influence, since it is in a position to provide a longer term strategy
> and thinking. However in practice the opposite appears to be the case,
> since the board is just as capable of being fickle, except they go
> further and they vote on their fickle decisions to start new  
> bandwagons.
> The downside being that the board being an authority figure results in
> smashing up all the other wagons in the process, even the ones that it
> helped to build.

The board is an elected board and I'am confident that they look for  
the better.