[squeak-dev] [Cuis] Cuis

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Wed Jan 20 14:54:12 UTC 2010


2010/1/20 keith <keith_hodges at yahoo.co.uk>:
> Hi Juan,
> I have been looking for a viable kernel on which to build my future
> production images, and a friendly community in which to participate.
> We had tabled the idea of forming a "guild" of nice people and squeak/pharo
> package developers for those of us who develop packages that we would like
> to be available to all oss smalltalkers. The problem being that squeak/pharo
> cores are wildly shifting sands, intent on imposing the ideas of their
> creators upon us, and they aren't really kernels, nor are they progressing
> in that direction.
> However with Cuis being more minimal, the architecture has the potential to
> be better layered, into kernel, system and application layers. Discussions
> in irc, seemed to suggest that Cuis might be a viable option.
> I have lots of questions and ideas.
> My first question is, do you have a plan? And where would be the forum for
> discussing plans. Are you on irc? Do you have a process for contributions to
> the Cuis kernel?
> In irc #squeak we had an impromptu discussion about making MC1.6 loadable,
> and providing tools like Sake/Packages and Installer for Cuis. I think that
> the ethos of Cuis being simple enough to be understandable fits quite well.
> For example, Installer was originally designed, as a means to an end, to be
> 1 class, but the "Installer replacement" new kid on the block "Gopher" is
> 33, and Sake/Packages is 4ish classes but Metacello is 40 classes. By the
> time Pharo has MC, MC2, Gopher and metacello loaded you are looking at 400
> classes in the image just for doing a #fileIn!

Maybe its because they want something more than just filein?

> In contrast Sake/Packages can potentially use a visitor to walk the
> dependency graph, in order to generate scripts. So "Bob the Builder" can
> potentially generate and apply a build script to an absolute minimal cuis
> image using #fileIn:
> I propose a way forward, to establish a number of initiatives,
> mini-projects, with the aim of contributing to the "kernel" of Cuis, and
> dividing up "System" to be a set of loadable modules to make "core/system"
> layer. I propose prefixing cuis discussions on squeak-dev with [Cuis] so we
> can filter out our discussions from squeak noise. Is there a cuis-dev list?
>
> So as an example, HTTPSocket/Network is conspicuous by its absence. Shall we
> estabish a project to work on this, or is it in hand?

It would be cool to have an 'official' Network package, maintained
separately, which could be
used by all existing Squeak forks.
Not just network, but it is good to start from.
I was always behind the idea, that image should be splitted on
multiple packages,
and changes to them should not be privatized by a single fork.
I am not sure, however, if squeak/pharo communities ready for such
ideological shift.
Your work on LPF proven that it is possible to create an artifact,
which can be loaded and used on multiple Squeak versions and its
forks.
I think that we still lack of infrastructure, for making such things happen.
I found, that GitHub (github.com) is a very interesting approach on
how to tame a 'forking chaos' into something productive, where
each party wins from cross-pollineation.

> regards
> Keith
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.



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