On 13.03.2009, at 04:32, Robert Hawley wrote:

> Hi Rita
>
> Thank you for your reply.  It is good to hear that the Etoy  
> protagonists would be interested in back-porting Etoys improvements  
> to the main Squeak release.
>
> However, do we know if the Squeak release builders want any  
> improvements to morphic - or are they going to cut back to a  
> minimorphic?

Well, I am one of the "Etoys protagonists" and just got re-elected by  
the community with my best-ever result (http://tinyurl.com/squeak2009)  
so I take that as a vote pro Etoys. It still will be a major chunk of  
work, but at least those most opposed to Etoys have their own way of  
working on a lean Squeak now.

> I still don't know what questions to ask about how things are  
> managed. I have been looking around more - there have been some  
> changes with lists recently that I didn't know about. (I notice that  
> the lists are not very used as yet.) I still don't have much clue as  
> to where to find things about what goes into the main Squeak  
> release, who controls it, or where to look to see the current state  
> of things. Advice would be welcome.

You are not alone. The truth is, there never has been a clear process  
ever since Squeak became community-driven. But it looks like the time  
is ripe now for change. The community has clearly voted for Andreas  
whose main campaigning platform was to establish those processes.

Anyway, merging the latest Etoys back into a squeak.org release will  
probably take a while. Well, unless we find enough volunteers with  
copious amounts of spare time ;)

If somebody is interested, the first thing to get an overview would be  
to review the change logs (we started with Etoys 1.0 = Squeak 3.8 and  
are now at Etoys 4.0):

http://etoys.laptop.org/src/

I'm pretty sure that rather few "system-level" methods were touched.  
One could start by cherry-picking "interesting" changes/fixes into 3.11.

For a full integration we probably need to packetize Etoys first, so  
we can at least compare Monticello packages between Etoys and Squeak.  
Comments welcome.

- Bert -