[From the soapbox:] Update stream are essential!!!

Hi All.

This is a piece of a response inspired by James post
(Adult Etoys). It needed to be in its own mail piece.
I seem to be posting the pieces bottom to top from a
long draft reply. So see future posts for more
context.

----

Now where did I put that soap box? I am feeling the
itching need for it. Ah, here it is.

Update stream are essential!!!

Currently 3.9 has done the development a great
disservice by choosing to force maintenence of ALL
code in the image as MC packages.
Remember what I said about big steps versus lots of
small incremental ones?

This is a life destroying decision for the squeak
community.

Look at how fast the OPLC team develops improvements
and look at the level of feedback they get.

Now compare that with the glacial pace of the squeak
image.
We have the best people I can imagine working on the
release team. There has been no alpha image release
and there is no way for test-pilots (alpha image user
and testers) to obtain an alpha image or give feedback
on it.

The release teams have gotten mired in redefining the
process of getting fixes and patches into squeak and
it looks like they will remain that way for several
releases to come.  The painful part of the problem is
that 3.9 started to burn the bridges to the old
processes.  

The number of fixes for painful problems in Squeak are
sitting on mantis rather than being available in an
update stream or thru an update list. The debugging
tool of having access to previous versions of methods
and a history of what was tried has been scuttled, not
deliberately, but because of unfortunate decisions
made early in the 3.9 release process and the cascade
of their consequences.

A lot of this would be resolved if a process for
making updates would include update streams (and
change sets) as the last word in developing images.

Build all you want from mcz or mcd files but then
allow updates from an update stream.

Dealing with package changes. If you can save an image
to disk, it should equally be possible to save an
image to disk as componentized packages. If it takes
considerably longer to save the components than the
image then what does that say about the whole notion
of componentizing the image?

One test any final candidate should be able to pass is
to be savable to disk. and then to be component
saveable to disk and component loadable (from a
kernel?) getting back an equivalent if not identical
image.

Doable?
My low opinion of MC (in the context of image
maintainence) is that
if there was a test.
it would not work.
if it did work it would take so much more time to
split/reassemble an image in that way that no one
would desire to spend the time to test it.
======

Thank you for your patience and interest. Let me put
the soapbox's away for a while.

========

Yours in service, --Jerome Peace


 
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Jerome Peace wrote:
> Look at how fast the OPLC team develops improvements
> and look at the level of feedback they get.
>
> Now compare that with the glacial pace of the squeak
> image.

I don't think this has anything at all to do with updates or Monticello
- just with the fact that some of the smartest and most efficient
Squeakers in the world put full-time effort into building a first-class
eToys experience on OLPC. Or do you really expect the (largely
unorganized) Squeak.org community to be able to effectively compete with
a small, dedicated group of people focusing on a specific project? In my
experience that ain't going to happen. Vision, focus, execution.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

You left out 'funding'.

On 6-Feb-07, at 6:28 PM, Todd Blanchard wrote:

> You left out 'funding'.

The key thing that allows you to spend time focussing on executing  
any vision.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
The best packed information most resembles random noise.

tim Rowledge wrote:
>
> On 6-Feb-07, at 6:28 PM, Todd Blanchard wrote:
>
>> You left out 'funding'.
>
> The key thing that allows you to spend time focussing on executing any
> vision.

Indeed. I thought that went without saying ;-)

Cheers,
   - Andreas

Jerome Peace wrote:
> This is a life destroying decision for the squeak
> community.
>
> Look at how fast the OPLC team develops improvements
> and look at the level of feedback they get.
>
> Now compare that with the glacial pace of the squeak
> image.

(Just because I only noticed it and it's so fitting in this discussion)
Even if you do consider The Image to be the sine qua non of Squeak, you
might want to have a look at:

http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2007/02/04/recent-squeak-packages-releases-2/

which may give you a different view of the "glacial" pace at which the
community as a whole moves. There is a whole lot of stuff going on if
you are willing to look beyond the image in front of you.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

Il giorno mer, 07/02/2007 alle 02.23 -0800, Andreas Raab ha scritto:
And those are just some of the announcements that were posted to
squeak-dev. Squeaksource and the SqueakMap are even more active.

        Giovanni

 > squeak-dev. Squeaksource and the SqueakMap are even more active.

http://planetmisc.squeak.org/ shows recent activity on the *sources. I've
just boosted the number of items. Please let me know if you find problems
with this.

Does SqueakMap have an activity feed we could include ?

Il giorno mer, 07/02/2007 alle 10.16 -0800, Simon Michael ha scritto:
>  > squeak-dev. Squeaksource and the SqueakMap are even more active.
>
> http://planetmisc.squeak.org/ shows recent activity on the *sources. I've
> just boosted the number of items. Please let me know if you find problems
> with this.
>
> Does SqueakMap have an activity feed we could include ?

You could use something like this:
http://page2rss.com/page/atom?url=map.squeak.org/recentnew

        Giovanni

Thank you Giovanni, trying that.