Ronald Spengler wrote:
> When the announcement that there was going to be a trunk repository
> and a contrib repository was made, I suddenly had hope again. The fact
> that there was a two-man release team that I didn't even know about
> (being a noob, I guess) didn't make a whit of difference to me,
> because they weren't shipping anything.

There was actually a one man release team (Matthew for 4.0) and another
two man release team (Keith and Matthew for 3.11), and though they both
were very busy with other things in their lives I think the board's
position (which I fully agreed with) that the relicensing was the
priority and new development would complicate it was the main cause of
the seeming lack of progress in Squeak. And I actually looked at the
archives of the Pharo mailing list at the time and compared it with the
number of entries on Mantis and found out that though they seemed very
different, the level of activity in both projects was comparable.

Unfortunately, appearance can matter more than reality. The *right*
thing for the board to have done would be to talk to Matthew and Keith
about the new direction, have a final vote in the following meeting and
then announce it here. Letting Keith find out with everybody else was
bad, so I see where the scheme explained by Phil would come in. But my
impression at the time was that two weeks of silence on squeak-dev (to
wait for the next board meeting) would cause lots of people to leave and
they might not later hear about the new process and decide to come back.
So I voted we do the wrong thing instead (the needs of the many outweigh
the needs of the few and that sort of thing) and still stand by that
decision.

I can't imagine some higher authority defending a developer from the
board even if this episode shows the need for something like that. So
the alternative is to complain about anything you don't like here on
squeak-dev. That has been done and even though there seemed to be no
immediate results it might have an effect (or not) in the next election.

-- Jecel