[squeak-dev] The future of Squeak & Pharo (was Re: [Pharo-project] [ANN] Pharo MIT license clean)

Juan Vuletich juan at jvuletich.org
Sun Jun 28 14:08:24 UTC 2009


Keith Hodges wrote:
> Juan Vuletich wrote:
>   
>> Göran Krampe wrote:
>>     
>>> ...
>>> So although I share your basic view of cross pollinating forks being
>>> a "Good Thing" and something we should embrace (see OLPC, Squeakland,
>>> Croquet etc etc) such forks need to have a specific goal.
>>>
>>> IMHO Pharo is not such a fork, Pharo is still very much "generic" as
>>> is Squeak.org. Pharo is more like "Squeak.org going agile" or
>>> "Smalltalk, with less talk" :). And thus it resembles XOrg much, much
>>> more than OpenBSD.
>>> ...
>>>       
>> This is the key issue here.
>>
>> At least Pharo has an agenda. Squeak needs an agenda badly. Something
>> along the lines of the old "Where is Squeak headed" from Dan. Without
>> that, Squeak can't advance in any direction at all. People choosing a
>> Smalltalk for their projects can not know what to expect. Forks can
>> not know if they are needed or not.
>>
>> Most forks have clearly defined objectives. Etoys, Croquet, Cuis do
>> have them. The objectives for Pharo are broader, and less defined. But
>> Pharo guys know where they are going, and they have some developer
>> time and organization to advance.
>>
>> Squeak has nothing of this.
>>
>>     
> Yes it has
>   
>> The Squeak community needs to define objectives and an agenda for Squeak,
>>     
> We have, and we have had our adgenda longer than pharo has had theirs.
> The irony being that having defined an agenda for moving forward in an
> inclusive manner, the pharo team forked!
>   

Squeak doesn't have a set of objectives and an agenda that is meaningful 
for developers. And it hasn't had it for a long time. Pharo is new. But 
Tweak, Croquet and Etoys forked looong time ago. Now you also have Pharo 
and Cuis. Most developers are contributing to forks, and we only send 
our stuff for Squeak as a side-effect.

I can't understand how it isn't obvious for everybody that something is 
going really wrong with our community, our leadership, our decision 
making and our release procedure.

>> or decide that we don't have them, and that the Squeak branch will not
>> be developed further.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Juan Vuletich
>>     
> There is so much FUD in the past couple of emails I cant even summon the
> energy to reply to them
>
> Keith

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list