>>>>> "Josh" == Josh Gargus <josh at schwa.ca> writes:

Josh> I believe that the two visions are fundamentally at odds.  I don't think
Josh> that it is a technical shortcoming of Sake/Packages, I just think that
Josh> any attempt to have universal cross-fork compatibility is fundamentally
Josh> doomed to either:

Josh> 1) fail, or

Josh> 2) "succeed", but at the cost of preventing fundamental improvements to
Josh> the programming model

Indeed.  One of the problems of non-trunk development is that the barrier
to contribution is far higher, because each individual contributor has
to understand how to make his idea *work* with *all* base images.

Whereas the model we have now, the Squeak base gets better by local commits
and by borrowing things that make sense from Pharo and Cuis, even though the
Pharo and Cuis committers didn't even know or care that Squeak may want to
borrow it.

And Pharo is getting better by borrowing *relevant* commits from
Squeak.

And I, as an individual committer to Squeak, don't have to know or care
whether my patch will work on Pharo.  It's up to the Pharo guys to
figure that out.

This is a far better system.  More commits, more progress has been made in the
past six months than the previous 18 months.

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
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