On 13.03.2009, at 17:00, Karl Ramberg wrote:

> On 2009-03-13 10:03, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> 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.
> There is Pavels Minimal Morphic with Etoys split out based on Juans  
> packages but those are probably 3.6  or 3.7, but is's a start :-)
> I'm not sure what is considered Etoys in those packages tho...or  
> what considered Etoys for that part at all.


Well, for the sake of this discussion I just care about merging all  
the improvements and bug fixes we did in the last 2+ years in the  
Etoys image back into the packages that make up the official Squeak  
image, and vice versa. This approach worked well back in 3.8 and so I  
expect it to work again.

For this to succeed we don't really need to define what part of Squeak  
is Etoys and what part is not.

- Bert -