2010/1/21 keith <keith_hodges at yahoo.co.uk>:
> Igor,
> first let us define some terms.
> The Squeak Community
> ===================
> You and the board appear to define community as "anyone who pipes up on
> squeak-dev".
> Now this definition has caused all manner of problems in the past especially
> with 3.9, and it resulted in the Pharo split, because the 3.9 team were
> constantly beaten up by people on squeak-dev. (One of those persons doing
> the beating happened to be Andreas). This definition of community also
> includes the average "lurker", who may download the image every now and then
> to see if it is interesting enough for them to not have to do java any
> more.

And if there's nothing new to download, in , say over a year, he
decides to keep doing java.


> The "team model" adopted and endorsed by the board for many years, whereby
> the teams had their discussions on a separate mailing list, specifically
> afforded a layer of protection from the wide ranging opinions of "lurkers".
> The flagrant violation of this simple social/political essential layer
> (which protected Ralph for more than 6 months), is what caused our problems
> in the first place, when Andreas went to squeak-dev with "this is the new
> process, I am a board member I can do what I like and I haven't even spoken
> to the release-team for two months". Andreas was elected on a mandate of
> helping along a release, and by implication to help along the release-team
> doing the release. That mandate did not include, using his position on the
> board to promote his own interests, and that of his company, over that of
> the communities interests, which I shall outline below.

I don't even want to comment your allusions concerning Andreas
'conspiracy' and his 'company'.
Star Wars and Emperor Palpatine is a fiction, not reality, keep
reminding this to yourself.
I just want to say: we're all having agendas, which crossing each
other, and which is a basement
of our common interest - use, develop and promote squeak & techs based on it.

The development of Hydra VM, inclusion of full closure support into
Squeak and Pharo made possible because
of this company good will to share these artifacts with OSS community.
And now you trying to sell us that these facts is indication of far
reaching plans to conquer the world?
Beware Luke, dark side of power is strong!


> My definition of "community" is, the body of individuals who have
> significant code bases built on squeak or squeak like base images, who are
> tasked with the problem of maintaining packages, for users who are using an
> ever increasing variety of tools and forks of squeak. My definition of
> "community" includes all pharo developers, pharo users, cuis developers, and
> cuis users, cobalt, croquet, etoys, gjallar the lot. For example, I consider
> Göran, who is tasked with the maintenance of Gjallar, to be the archetypal,
> community member, whose needs bear understanding and supporting.
> So the "lurkers" who download an image occasionally, they pop up on
> squeak-dev and see "nothing appears to have changed in 4 years". These are
> the ones that panicked the board, people I had never heard of, and as far as
> I know had no commits to any current projects i.e. they aren't really part
> of the community.
> The "community" who have actual code running, have seen that the range of
> tools they can use to make their job easier to move their code about, to
> test it and to deploy their code for different clients has steadily
> increased and improved over the past 4 years. Now we have package management
> systems, improved testing tools (TestReporter), improved MC, Logging, Rio,
> Sake, Bob, AtomicLoading, Installer, and LPF *** running in all base images.
> The Vision
> =========
> The "lurkers" just want to see a new flashy image, that they might try a
> little project in one day.

All 'grand' projects growing out from small ones. Which makes little
ones as much as valuable
as any of your 'grand' project. I'd prefer seeing 10 little projects
popping out each month, than
1 grand project popping out once in 2 years.

> The "community" want to see the board provide vision and to promote harmony
> both philosophically/ideologically, and with technical facilities; harmony
> among all squeak forks, even those who don't want to be harmonised (i.e.
> Pharo). The community members want to be able to publish a package (e.g.
> Magma) and have it be tested to work for everyone, whether they be pharo
> users or squeak users. The community wants to be able keep its large
> published, even deployed code bases up to date and bug free.
> This means that "the community" don't want yet another fork to support, the
> communities enthusiasm for "yet more of the same" waned when pharo forked,
> and no one wanted to volunteer for 3.11 after 3.10. To be honest we were all
> too busy just keeping our own code bases running, to have to worry about
> another fork of squeak.
> In anticipation of spoon aka squeak 5.0, those of us with big code bases are
> already anticipating a significant porting effort in the future, we don't
> want to have another one foisted on us every 6 months.
> Where are we now
> ==============
> The board has responsibility to the community, the whole community, and I
> don't just limit that to squeak users.
> This means that the board needs to set and understand its terms of
> engagement, that it is here to provide an "older and wiser supervisory"
> service different branches of the community, to foster an inclusive
> "culture" around which interesting innovations and solutions can happen.
> It is not here to promote the interests of Andreas, and his company in the
> following:
> 1. Producing yet another fork for its own sake, "fork de andreas", and
> calling it squeak  - is not in the interests of the community.
> 2. Undermining the existing common tools and the progress made, in the past
> 3 years by the community***
> 3. Orphaning existing code bases, not providing any fixes to us, or a
> migration path.
> 4. Ignoring users of other forks, and users trapped by inertia in past
> squeak releases.

Star Wars, Episode V.

[snip]

> We had
> a golden age in which you could load any bug fix you needed direct form
> Mantis, well now no one is providing fixes there any more. You are forced to
> use trunk to avail yourself of important fixes, but trunk is a moving target
> and is pre-release.

Write tool to leverage the trunk activity then. Stop whining about
losing control (via Mantis).
People like a new and easy way to contribute, otherwise nobody would
put any commits in trunk.
Is this something that hard to understand?

> The Boards Job
> ============
-----
"I will not contribute any further to
> squeak, until the board has some form of terms of reference, which protects
> anyone from going through what I went through in the future."

Feel free to raise this topic again , before eyes of newly elected board.
I will not run for the next year anyways.

> regards
> Keith
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.