[squeak-dev] Maintaining Etoys in Squeak

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Fri Jul 3 10:48:28 UTC 2009


On 03.07.2009, at 01:44, Colin Putney wrote:

> On 2-Jul-09, at 2:49 PM, Ramon Leon wrote:
>
>> Exactly the point, Etoys already forked.  Stop holding onto an old  
>> rotting version in Squeak that isn't used, take it out, it doesn't  
>> belong there. People who want eToys have their fork where it is  
>> maintained.
>
> I think this is one of the key issues in the wider Squeak community  
> right now, made all the more difficult because the Etoys team has  
> been completely silent on the issue.

Err, counting the number of mails I sent on the subject just in the  
last few days can hardly be called "completely silent," can it?

> It's clear that Etoys can be excised from Squeak - it's been done a  
> few times already. It's much more difficult to separate out a  
> working Etoys package that can be loaded into a base image,  
> particularly since the people that would be best able to do that are  
> busy with other things. But even if we put in the effort and managed  
> to create a loadable Etoys package, it's not clear that it would  
> ever get used.

Once it reaches a state as stable as the current Squeakland release,  
yes, definitely.

> So how about it, Etoys developers? Are you at all interested in  
> synchronizing with Squeak at some point in the future?

Yes.

> If so, how do you imagine it could be accomplished?

Figuring that out is precisely why I started this thread. I don't  
exactly know.

> Is there value in the Etoys code that's part of Squeak 3.10?

There might well be a few fixes that have not made it over into the  
Squeakland release.

> Would you be interested in having a cleanly defined Etoys package?

Yes, because that's the chosen unit of work in this community.

> I'm not asking for promises, here, just opinions. Even something  
> vague like "Syncronizing would be nice, but we have other  
> priorities" or "We're planning to sync, but we've got a deadline  
> just now, please bear with us" would make this debate much more  
> productive.


"we'd love to sync with squeak.org, but we're only a handful of  
volunteers so far, so we need help"

Maybe I need to restate the current affairs:

Etoys development was funded for over 2 years by VPRI, to create a  
version for the One Laptop Per Child project, running in Linux under  
Sugar. That Etoys version has also been adapted to work on regular  
machines, this is the new release at Squeakland.org.

Now the keys have been passed on to the Squeakland Foundation, and  
development is done solely by volunteers. The Foundation is seeking  
funds, but even if they were successful in raising money it would not  
go primarily to sponsoring developers but on creating documentation,  
curricula, etc. Unless it's Big Money of course ;)

So Etoys is considered stable for now, the volunteer developers are  
mainly busy with bug fixing. But future development would be much more  
effective in close cooperation with squeak.org.

And clearly, both sides benefit. A lot of improvements in the VM were  
driven by Etoys needs (I maintained an "olpc" VM branch for a while  
that has now been folded back into the trunk). Localization has been  
advanced considerably. Parts that were easily separable from Etoys  
have actually been made available to Squeak in general (e.g., D-Bus  
support for Linux, the GStreamer media framework, Cairo/Pango  
rendering, as well as occasional fixes we posted to Mantis).  
Conversely Etoys would benefit from improvements in Squeak that have  
been done since development forked, so it looks like a clear win-win  
to me.

Besides, Squeak and Etoys are still synonymous to many people (as you  
can see from a lot of postings on the newbies list) so one major  
source of confusion would dry up. Or maybe not ;)

- Bert -




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