Contributors Agreement signature status?

I was talking to Jon Hylands ( http://www.huv.com ) at Smalltalk Solutions
at the Squeak booth, and he said that one possible use of Spoon could be for
plug-ins. The idea was that a person could download both the image and the
virtual machine, and then see a Squeak app in their browser. This idea is
very appealing to me. Is this something Spoon could do?

Chris Cunnington
http://www.seasideparasol.com

Hi Avi--

> The original problem was "how do we know when Spoon has succeeded?".

     Sorry, I wasn't clear. I thought the original problem in this
thread was "How can I get people to use Spoon?". Several have said
"People will use it when they perceive it as successful". Then success
is defined, at least in part, as "Someone has used it successfully."

     I hope the tautology is apparent. If not, I don't see what else to
say at the moment, so I'll stop. :)


     thanks again,

-C

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

Hi Avi--

> > Having a short-term-gain mindset at all times will cause the total
> > effort to be much harder and take much longer. I'm sorry if this
> > sounds harsh (it sounds harsh to me, you don't need to convince me
> > of that :). Despite that, I think it's still best to speak plainly
> > here.
>
> I'll speak plainly back, then.

     Thank you!

     There were two principles I was following. The first was that,
occasionally, a system requires important fundamental changes to remain
vital. I refer to previously-expressed concepts of "blue plane" or "burn
the disk packs" thinking. (I hesitate to use those particular phrases,
because I think much of their power in this community derives from
nostaliga. I do think, however, that they truly were valid ideas.) I
came to believe that the Squeak community was particularly receptive to
these ideas, not just the people espousing them or the funding they
represented.

     The second principle was that discussion of a shared vision could
ameliorate the lack of a short-term gain, and even hasten the
implementation of the vision by attracting volunteers. There was a time
in the Squeak community, it seemed to me, when we could discuss the
merits of an idea before the implementation was finished. I found it
useful, and inspiring. This is why I have been writing progress reports
for Spoon and asking for feedback.

     I'm quite willing to grant that I've misunderstood these
principles, or that they don't hold anymore (whether or not they ever
actually did).

     That's a straw man argument. In reality, there's usually a
discussion as to whether the design is worth funding (if there was a
vote, did you participate? What was your consideration process?). If
passed, the people building the system attempt to draw the labor from
people who at least are interested in participating, and who probably
also consider themselves qualified. (If you want to pursue this analogy
further, please use a new thread?)


     thanks again,

-C

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

Hi Blake--

> Maybe I mis-appraise the situation, I can't recall Craig ever asking
> for help. Other than "try out the latest", that is. I don't think
> there's much to be done until Spoon is usable to start adding on.

     I had thought I was asking for help by asking for feedback about
the design ideas, as mentioned in the Spoon progress reports.


-C

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

Hi Bill--

> Just my 2 asCents.  Feel free to straighten me out as appropriate.

     Just one quibble... :)

> Spoon appears to be a very much different effort, and one that is
> years old.

     Okay, how long was it supposed to take, and why? :)  Again, I'm
interested in knowing the perceived constraints.


     thanks,

-C

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

Craig,

I was not commenting on how long much time something should take, so
much as on the (lack of) equivalence between your work and what Pavel is
trying to do (as I understand it).  In the flood of posts, I thought I
saw you claim that Pavel is duplicating parts of spoon.  He wants the
3.10 packaging done yesterday, where you are obviously (witness spoon
and squat before it) willing to spend years in the quest for a
slash/burn/rebuild solution.  There is room (even need) for both
approaches, but I think Pavel's approach will do more good for more
Squeakers in far less time than Spoon can do on a similar time scale.
That is not to say that you will not ultimately create the kernel on top
of which future Squeak versions will run, but I do not think that
Squeak's development should wait for you to finish what is certainly a
big job.  Finally, note that packaging will make it easier to merge the
two systems in the future.

Bill





Craig Latta wrote:
Hi Bill--

> Just my 2 asCents. Feel free to straighten me out as appropriate.

Just one quibble... :)

> Spoon appears to be a very much different effort, and one that is
> years old.

Okay, how long was it supposed to take, and why? :) Again, I'm
interested in knowing the perceived constraints.



Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: [hidden email]
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029

On 7/6/07, Craig Latta <[hidden email]> wrote:

>      The second principle was that discussion of a shared vision could
> ameliorate the lack of a short-term gain, and even hasten the
> implementation of the vision by attracting volunteers. There was a time
> in the Squeak community, it seemed to me, when we could discuss the
> merits of an idea before the implementation was finished. I found it
> useful, and inspiring. This is why I have been writing progress reports
> for Spoon and asking for feedback.

Aha.  My personal observation has been that this principle does not
hold.  One piece of evidence I have is the various version control
systems I have worked on for Squeak.  The current version of
Monticello arose through a series of very incremental and (in
retrospect) "unnecessary" early versions (including "DVS" before it
was called "Monticello"), but each of which was released as a working
and useful artifact without any prior discussion.

For Monticello 2, on the other hand, we've released plenty of
information, tried to open discussion many times, asked for volunteers
at several points, but never released something that people could
actually use for their daily work.  Result: apart from Damien who
recently got some funding to work on it, we've had no response
whatsoever.
This despite the fact that MC2 is a much better and more ambitious
design than any of the prior versions of MC.

I've seen similar patterns with Seaside versions over the years:
discussions about the future go precisely nowhere.  Ditto experimental
branches for people to play with.  But make a deep change that still
lets people get their work done and nobody blinks.

Avi

On Fri, 06 Jul 2007 11:07:42 -0700, Craig Latta <[hidden email]> wrote:

>
> Hi Blake--
>
>> Maybe I mis-appraise the situation, I can't recall Craig ever asking
>> for help. Other than "try out the latest", that is. I don't think
>> there's much to be done until Spoon is usable to start adding on.
>
>      I had thought I was asking for help by asking for feedback about
> the design ideas, as mentioned in the Spoon progress reports.

Craig,

        Oh, sure. To continue the metaphor, you're a guy with a shovel saying,  
"Well, what's the best place to dig?" That's asking for help.

        But that's an entirely different sort of help from, "Help me dig," which  
was the sort of help Avi was talking about, I believe.

        ===Blake===

On Fri, 06 Jul 2007 08:23:57 -0700, Chris Cunnington  
<[hidden email]> wrote:

>
> I was talking to Jon Hylands ( http://www.huv.com ) at Smalltalk  
> Solutions at the Squeak booth, and he said that one possible use of  
> Spoon could be for plug-ins. The idea was that a person could download  
> both the image and the virtual machine, and then see a Squeak app in  
> their browser. This idea is
> very appealing to me. Is this something Spoon could do?

You can do that now with Squeak. I would imagine a design like Spoon would  
make such things easier. (Some of Craig's derscriptions remind me of IBM's  
touting of SOM in the early '90s: You would run programs made of objects,  
but you'd never have to know/care whether the objects were on a PC, a  
mainframe, on your local hard-drive or somewhere else in the world, etc.)

On 7/6/07, Blake <[hidden email]> wrote:

>         Oh, sure. To continue the metaphor, you're a guy with a shovel saying,
> "Well, what's the best place to dig?" That's asking for help.
>
>         But that's an entirely different sort of help from, "Help me dig," which
> was the sort of help Avi was talking about, I believe.

I think this is missing the point of my metaphor a bit, though, which
was that regardlessof what the guy with the shovel wants, what I need
in that situation is a cab.  It's hard to pay much attention to the
subway construction when you're so focused on making the next plane,
which I think a lot of us are.

Avi

On Fri, 06 Jul 2007 12:49:16 -0700, Avi Bryant <[hidden email]> wrote:

Fair 'nuff. I'd only add that there are lots of us standing on the curb,  
and the situations are different for all of us. And my point was, I don't  
think there'll be any shortage of people willing to help build the subway,  
even as we're using the bus or Pavel's shuttle* to get there now.

And with that, I think I've beaten the metaphor to death.

        ===Blake===

*By the way, has anyone reported here on using Pavel's stuff? I see lots  
of options on his site; I'd be interested to know how it was working out  
for people.

On Jul 6, 2007, at 2:38 PM, Blake wrote:


I think you're still missing the point of the metaphor. Pavel is  
driving the cab.

To continue with the "speaking plainly" theme, I'll make it all a bit  
more concrete. I'm working with Avi on Dabble DB. The image we use is  
a shrunken version of Squeak 3.7. The shrinking code is based, at  
least in part, on Pavel's work. It's not as fancy as Spoon, nor is it  
even as good as Pavel's most recent work, since that doesn't work in  
Squeak 3.7. But right now, today, it gives us an image with a  
reasonably small number unneeded objects, and given that we have tens  
of thousands of them in production, that's important.

This thread began with Pavel's request for information about the  
licencing status of the the methods that are in his smallest image.  
Craig replied to that post here:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-July/ 
118271.html

Note in particular these paragraphs:


> I'm still puzzled as to why you feel the need to duplicate the
> Spoon work (and then use false superlatives to describe the result).
> What's going on here?
>


> I'm mostly a technocrat: I want to put my effort into the
> technology I think is most effective. Do you have a similar  
> mindset? Is
> there something about Spoon that you think is lacking? Are we dealing
> with technical issues, or political ones, or something else? It's not
> clear to me why, apparently, we're working at cross purposes.
>

Both Pavel and Avi have answered these questions in the same way:  
Pavel's work provides almost as much benefit as Spoon, but with much  
lower adoption risk.

Col

On Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:42:04 -0700, Colin Putney <[hidden email]>  
wrote:

Ah, I missed that the reactions were in response to this:

>> I'm still puzzled as to why you feel the need to duplicate the
>> Spoon work (and then use false superlatives to describe the result).
>> What's going on here?

So, never mind.<s> (I can't even find the earlier messages, weirdly  
enough.)

Now, I always thought that reduce-from-large effort was meant as a "we can  
use this now" approach while the grow-from-nothing effort was meant as an  
ideal goal for the future. Since the dependencies have to be worked out  
anyway, wouldn't the reduction effort ultimately feed into the  
grow-from-nothing fork?

That said, I'm not sure how useful comparisons can be made between  
something in production and something in alpha.

Dear Avi and all,
> For Monticello 2, on the other hand, we've released plenty of
> information, tried to open discussion many times, asked for volunteers
I am not sure what you mean by plenty of information though. There is
source code. Long ago I concluded that the "Avi" definition of "plenty
of information" differs greatly from mine. How about some white papers?
> at several points, but never released something that people could
> actually use for their daily work.  Result: apart from Damien who
> recently got some funding to work on it, we've had no response
> whatsoever.
This is not strictly true.

In the spirit of incremental, and hence hopefully adoptable progress.
There is a version of Monticello1 which has SystemEditor from MC2 in it,
ready to use. It only took one day to put this in, I did it about 6
weeks ago, and it is ready to roll when SystemEditor works.
> This despite the fact that MC2 is a much better and more ambitious
> design than any of the prior versions of MC.
So we are ready to go when SystemEditor from MC2 is ready.  
Unfortunately I dont know enough about the compilation/class composition
of squeak to fix it. I will also say that SystemEditor is a really
impressive bit of code, and I dont feel in any way qualified to
contribute to it.

best regards

Keith

Colin Putney wrote:
> To continue with the "speaking plainly" theme, I'll make it all a bit
> more concrete. I'm working with Avi on Dabble DB. The image we use is a
> shrunken version of Squeak 3.7. The shrinking code is based, at least in
> part, on Pavel's work. It's not as fancy as Spoon, nor is it even as
> good as Pavel's most recent work, since that doesn't work in Squeak 3.7.
> But right now, today, it gives us an image with a reasonably small
> number unneeded objects, and given that we have tens of thousands of
> them in production, that's important.

How small are they?

Cheers,
   - Andreas

On 7/6/07, Andreas Raab <[hidden email]> wrote:
Not all that small - I think the base 3.7 image we're using was in the
4-5MB range, once Seaside etc is loaded into it it's more like 7.5MB,
and once all of our application code is in it's around 10MB.  So we
could do a lot better.  But it's still about half what it would be if
we based it on 3.9final.

Avi

we hope with damien to
        - get MC2 usable for everybody
        - have a good documentation (white paper)

But now I'm running to find a flat in the other side of france :)
Boxing after unboxing.... ooops packing after unpacking... this is life.

Stef
       
On 7 juil. 07, at 04:00, Keith Hodges wrote:


keith I'm confused. Is systemeditor working or not?

     Here are some explicit requests for help:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2003-May/000010.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2004-March/000049.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2004-March/000050.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2004-August/000060.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2004-December/000063.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2006-January/000103.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2007-March/000155.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2007-April/000191.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2007-June/000203.html

     I got help on each of these things from several people who
responded, except for:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2004-March/000049.html

     There are also requests for help on the Spoon website. I got a lot
of good help from people trying out the releases, e.g., the responses to
the 2a releases and the Spoon book draft in April 2007.


-C

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

On Sun, 08 Jul 2007 22:55:04 -0700, Craig Latta <[hidden email]> wrote:

>      I got help on each of these things from several people who
> responded, except for:
>
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/spoon/2004-March/000049.html

Make the VM as small as possible? 200K is the current "smallest size"?

Hi Blake--

> Make the VM as small as possible? 200K is the current "smallest size"?

     Yes.


     thanks again,

-C

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]