[squeak-dev] Q: Contributing to Squeak

Hi,

If one wants to contribute to Squeak but uses Etoys/Linux most of the time,
where should the contributions be made?
   - etoys in dev.laptop.org
   - squeak mainline (bugs.squeak.org)
   - etoys in tracker.squeakland.org

Will Etoys ever merge into mainline Squeak (say in Squeak 4.0). Will it then
appear as a changeset that can be applied to Squeak rather than a separate
image?

TIA .. Subbu

Tracker.squeakland.org is for Ètoys.

dev.laptop is mostly for issue with sugar etoys.

I dont think Etoys will merge in the short future. The task is too
big, and other stuff have higher priority.

And most of all, it's great you want to contribute :-)

Karl


On 4/16/09, K. K. Subramaniam <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Friday 17 April 2009 1:06:36 am karl ramberg wrote:
> Tracker.squeakland.org is for Ètoys.
That makes it my first stop.

> I dont think Etoys will merge in the short future. The task is too
> big, and other stuff have higher priority.
Who harvests updates and fixes going into the mainline Squeak into Etoys
branch? Is this done on a case by case basis by filing separate requests in
tracker?

Subbu

On 16.04.2009, at 21:20, K. K. Subramaniam wrote:

> Hi,
>
> If one wants to contribute to Squeak but uses Etoys/Linux most of  
> the time,
> where should the contributions be made?
>   - etoys in dev.laptop.org

Since OLPC went out of the software business, this is pretty much  
obsolete. For issues specific to running in Sugar, use

http://dev.sugarlabs.org/

If you suspect it has to do with the XO hardware, then dev.laptop.org  
would still be appropriate.

>   - squeak mainline (bugs.squeak.org)
>   - etoys in tracker.squeakland.org

Both would be most useful. At least until we established some  
procedure to cross-merge changes.

I'd file a report on either of the two, and link to it in the other.  
Which one is primary would depend on the issue - if it directly  
affects Etoys users I'd say squeakland, otherwise squeak.org.

> Will Etoys ever merge into mainline Squeak (say in Squeak 4.0).

Not in 4.0 yet. But in the long term I hope that Squeakland Etoys will  
again at least share a base with the squeak.org release, and possibly  
even be one flavor of it. Ideas welcome.

> Will it then
> appear as a changeset that can be applied to Squeak rather than a  
> separate
> image?


Unlikely, although the exact way it's going to work is not fixed yet.

- Bert -

On 16.04.2009, at 22:06, K. K. Subramaniam wrote:


For now, yes. Finding someone doing that on a regular basis would be a  
most welcome contribution.

- Bert -

Hello!

>> Will Etoys ever merge into mainline Squeak (say in Squeak 4.0).
>
> Not in 4.0 yet. But in the long term I hope that Squeakland Etoys will again
> at least share a base with the squeak.org release, and possibly even be one
> flavor of it. Ideas welcome.

Concerning this merging aspect: I was last Saturday doing workshops to
present Squeak to teachers of the Toulouse region, in France. While
I'm a Squeak user since some years now, I decided this time to use the
Etoys 3.0 image on normal Ubuntus, to "see" how teachers would react.

The result is clear: Etoys is *much* simpler to use for teachers than
Squeak 3.10. Bigger icons, a lot of things useless for end-user
removed, much harder to "mess" the image with unexpected windows
everywhere, a lot of extremely relevant examples of projects, etc. And
translations in a lot of language are available. I will probably
promote from now on this Etoys image amongst the teachers.

So my questions are:
- what is today the focus of the main Squeak images? education?
research? is it meant to stay in developer hands?
- what is the mid-term vision? merging with Etoys?
- where should I contribute, as someone mostly interested in a
concrete use of Squeak with the kids?

Greetings,
Severin

2009/5/18 Séverin Lemaignan <[hidden email]>:
> Hello!
>
>>> Will Etoys ever merge into mainline Squeak (say in Squeak 4.0).
>>
>> Not in 4.0 yet. But in the long term I hope that Squeakland Etoys will again
>> at least share a base with the squeak.org release, and possibly even be one
>> flavor of it. Ideas welcome.

I'm a bit pessismistic about a future merge ... because the concerns
of the different communities (educators, developpers, ...) are very
different.
Nevertheless, there are various efforts with Squeak 3.11/4.0 and Pharo
1.0, to have a more bug-prone, small kernel. So maybe in the future,
Etoys could be based on one of theses initiatives.

I think it's a good idea.

> So my questions are:
> - what is today the focus of the main Squeak images? education?
> research? is it meant to stay in developer hands?

In developer hand i guess.

> - what is the mid-term vision? merging with Etoys?
> - where should I contribute, as someone mostly interested in a
> concrete use of Squeak with the kids?

http://squeakland.org/ is the place for all the Etoys activities.

Best regards,
--
Serge Stinckwich
UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC), Hanoi, Vietnam
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]
http://doesnotunderstand.org/

On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 14:12 +0700, Serge Stinckwich wrote:
I'm new here. Not to Smalltalk, but that's another long story. I am
trying to understand Squeak as an educational tool, and Etoys.

I am a big fan of FreeBSD and am running Squeak 3.9 on FreeBSD 7.1 and
Gnome 2.4. Is there something else I need to learn about and develop
Etoys? There is no Etoys port in the ports tree.

What does the web browser plug-in do? When I try to sample Etoys on the
web site I am told I need the plug-in, yet one does not exist for
FreeBSD. Is the Etoys system designed so only developers can build the
apps, and students just play with the results via a web browser? Or is
the idea to offer an alternative to installing Squeak, to reach a wider
audience? If I have Squeak installed, do I need the browser plug-in?

Taking a step back, I have noticed that Squeak has gotten a lot more
complex than the Smalltalk I worked with so many years ago. (Hint: it
ran on Windows 3.1. Very slowly!) So complex that it may be
inappropriate even for high school students. In this sense has it lost
sight of Alan Kay's Dynabook? Sorry if this is a recurring issue. Again,
my excuse is that I am new here!

--
Gary Dunn, Honolulu
[hidden email]
http://openslate.net/
http://e9erust.blogspot.com/
Sent from Slate001

Gary Dunn wrote:
> I am a big fan of FreeBSD and am running Squeak 3.9 on FreeBSD 7.1 and
> Gnome 2.4. Is there something else I need to learn about and develop
> Etoys? There is no Etoys port in the ports tree.
>  
I don't know about the plugin issues that you mention below, but you
should just need to install lang/squeak, and download the Etoys image
from wherever, and run it.

That is, lang/squeak installs the VM (and a plain image).

The port's a bit dated, installing Squeak 3.9-7. If you want something
later than that, Takeshi MUTOH has a beta 3.10 port at
http://qml.610t.org/squeak/VM_test.html.

frank

On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 09:54 +0100, Frank Shearar wrote:
> Gary Dunn wrote:
> > I am a big fan of FreeBSD and am running Squeak 3.9 on FreeBSD 7.1 and
> > Gnome 2.4. Is there something else I need to learn about and develop
> > Etoys? There is no Etoys port in the ports tree.
> >  
> I don't know about the plugin issues that you mention below, but you
> should just need to install lang/squeak, and download the Etoys image
> from wherever, and run it.

Sources such as the Squeak swiki say to download Etoys from Squeakland
(http://www.squeakland.org/download/), but that is where I only find
downloads for Windows, Mac, Debian Linux and a Linux RPM. The release
notes suggest these are complete implementations of Squeak. The release
notes also describe a universal edition for the XO, but I don't see how
to get it.

>
> That is, lang/squeak installs the VM (and a plain image).
>
> The port's a bit dated, installing Squeak 3.9-7. If you want something
> later than that, Takeshi MUTOH has a beta 3.10 port at
> http://qml.610t.org/squeak/VM_test.html.

Thanks, but I'm sure I would not know the difference.
--
Gary Dunn, Honolulu
[hidden email]
http://openslate.net/
http://e9erust.blogspot.com/
Sent from Slate001

Gary Dunn wrote: OK. The image in each release will be identical; only the VM will differ.

You should be able to download any of those releases, and run the (Etoy)
image in that release with your installed VM.

frank

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 9:03 AM, Gary Dunn  wrote:

> I am a big fan of FreeBSD and am running Squeak 3.9 on FreeBSD 7.1 and
> Gnome 2.4. Is there something else I need to learn about and develop
> Etoys? There is no Etoys port in the ports tree.

>> The port's a bit dated, installing Squeak 3.9-7. If you want something
>> later than that, Takeshi MUTOH has a beta 3.10 port at
>> http://qml.610t.org/squeak/VM_test.html.
>
> Thanks, but I'm sure I would not know the difference.

You _will_ know the difference if you want to use Etoys.

The version of Etoys in Squeak 3.9 is at least 3 years out of date
(and was not updated in 3.10 as far as I know.)

VPRI invested a lot of time and money in Etoys in recent years, so
that the current version available from
http://www.squeakland.org/download/ has both a new virtual machine
(VM) and a new smalltalk image.

You don't need to build it from a FreeBSD port repository.  You only
__need__ 4 things to use or develop with Etoys: the Etoys image file
(etoys.image), both Etoys sources files (EtoysV3.sources and
etoys.changes), and a Squeak virtual machine.

Squeak images work bit-identically on all platforms, so as long as you
get the latest image file and sources files, that is fine.  Unzip the
Linux DEB or RPM file from http://www.squeakland.org/download/ for the
current Etoys files.

A little more difficult is getting a VM, which should be matched to
your OS, your processor architecture, and ideally to Etoys.  The Etoys
VM has new multimedia plugins* and has been optimized for Linux on the
XO-1 One Laptop Per Child, though I guess that many of the changes
also work on other platforms.  I don't run FreeBSD, but I would
suggest trying one of the FreeBSD trunk VMs from
http://www.squeakvm.org/unix/ .  The changelogs at squeakvm.org
suggest that many - perhaps all - the Etoys fixes have been added to
those builds.  If a FreeBSD build doesn't work for you, another option
might be the Etoys Linux VM (from the Squeakland DEB or RPM package)
under Linux emulation.

(The Linux VM is in  ./usr/share/Etoys.app/Contents/Linux686/ in the
squeakland DEB archive.  Start it with with  Bert Freudenberg's shell
script etoys.sh included in the DEB/RPM.  It may not be 100%
functional - when Etoys tries to make a sound on my Ubuntu 9.04
machine I get "soundStart: snd_add_pcm_handler: Function not
implemented" but you may be more fortunate than me.)

* a virtual machine plugin is not a browser plugin.  Don't worry about
the browser plugin for now - the OLPC Sugar project doesn't use it
either, as far as I can tell.

> What does the web browser plug-in do? When I try to sample Etoys on the
> web site I am told I need the plug-in, yet one does not exist for
> FreeBSD. Is the Etoys system designed so only developers can build the
> apps, and students just play with the results via a web browser? Or is
> the idea to offer an alternative to installing Squeak, to reach a wider
> audience? If I have Squeak installed, do I need the browser plug-in?

None of the above.  In the way that the Sun Java browser plugin allows
you to play games (applets) in your browser window, and the Adobe
Reader plugin allows you to read PDFs without leaving your browser,
the squeak plugin allows you to play with an Etoys Project File
(squeaklet) by clicking a web link, such as the links on
http://www.pcs.cnu.edu/~rcaton/ancient/students.html .  You need to
install Etoys to use the browser plugin.

Anyone, student, teacher or hacker, can develop or improve an Etoy,
also known as a Project, by following the tutorials included in Etoys.

> Taking a step back, I have noticed that Squeak has gotten a lot more
> complex than the Smalltalk I worked with so many years ago. (Hint: it
> ran on Windows 3.1. Very slowly!) So complex that it may be
> inappropriate even for high school students.

I haven't looked closely at other Smalltalks, but I do have a Cincom
VisualWorks image, and Squeak looks similar to that, though the halos
and menus seem bigger.  If you want the Smalltalk you used 15 years
ago, you might find that your vendor offers  versions for current
operating systems.

Since you already know Smalltalk, the Squeak By Example book may help
explain the UI, development tools and syntax of Squeak 3.9 (and Squeak
3.10)
http://www.squeakbyexample.org/

There are some other educational tools based on Squeak: Botsinc,
Scratch and Alice come to mind.  Each teaches different things, and
may be more complicated than Etoys, but less complicated than the
standard Smalltalk development tools and language.

Hope that helps.  I have omitted some details that can be found
elsewhere, but if you need further pointers please come back to the
list.

David

On 19.05.2009, at 04:38, Gary Dunn wrote:

Yes, we need to improve the Squeakland download pages for "non-
regular" users (e.g. using minor platforms, developers, etc). Ideas  
and help appreciated.

> The release
> notes also describe a universal edition for the XO, but I don't see  
> how
> to get it.

Here it is:

http://etoys.laptop.org/src/etoys-image-and-pr.zip

Run the included image using a Squeak VM of your choice (the more  
recent the better but should still work on older ones)

- Bert -