Squeak-dev November 2006

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

157 participants
223 discussions

[ANN] SmallDEVS
by Elod Kironsky 04 Nov '06

04 Nov '06

Hi! I would like to announce SmallDEVS - a DEVS modeling and simulation framework for Smalltalk. You can get more info at: www.fit.vutbr.cz/~janousek/SmallDEVS. This tool is mainly for educational and *experimental* purposes (don't expect an industry ready tool) and introduces a new perspective on DEVS modeling and simulation methodology, namely prototype-based modeling. Any comment, bugreports, etc. are welcomed :-) Cheers, Elod

3 5

News Report for October, 2006
by Giovanni Corriga 04 Nov '06

04 Nov '06

The purpose of the News team is to publish news regarding Squeak development and use. It aims to provide a service to the Squeak community, highlighting anything which the Squeak users may find interesting in The Weekly Squeak newszine. It will also try to promote Squeak outside its own community, by submitting articles and news items to mainstream websites such as Slashdot and OSNews. October has been the first month during which we were fully operational. The Weekly Squeak blog ( http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com ) is now getting more than 400 views per day, with a peak of slightly more than 1500. The RSS2 feed gets ~50 reads per day. The increase in viewers is due to the greater number of articles posted to the blog, and to the fact that a couple of articles have appeared on reddit.com . Also, we're starting getting referrals from sites such as lambda-the-ultimate.org and redhanded.hobix.com, that have a greater audience. Michael Haupt has joined the News team after a call for help on the beginners mailing list. Michael is responsible for the weekly summaries that get sent to the lists every monday. http://news.squeak.org now redirects to the blog. Most important open issues: 1. We still can't manage to get at least one post per day. But we're improving. 2. There's some stuff (post editing/deletion after publication, comment moderation) for which we should define some policies. The actions scheduled for October were: 1. Try to add one or two posts to the blog everyday. 50% completed. 2. Resume production of weekly summaries to be sent to the mailing list(s). 100% completed. 3. Try to find some more contributors, and start tracking more mailing lists. 100% completed. Actions scheduled for November: 1. Post at least one item per day. 2. Add more mailing list (Squeakland and Croquet maybe?) 3. Improve integration with the main squeak.org site. Long term actions: 1. start producing articles to be sent to mainstream news sites. 2. move the blog to news.squeak.org maybe? 3. Guest bloggers? The News team has a mailing list (news at lists.squeakfoundation.org, subscribe at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/news ). Everyone can subscribe to the list, even if just for lurking, but new team members are always welcome ;) Giovanni

2 1

SETools team report Oktober 2006
by Hans N Beck 04 Nov '06

04 Nov '06

Hi, the SETools team has its focus on tools for software engineering, either written in Squeak or for Squeak. In Oktober 2006 this happened: - Göran Krampe has shown Gjallar at OOPSLA. He will provide a special report soon. Gjallar for Mac is not far away, also there will be a new distribution 0.3 of Gjallar the next time. The Gjallar team has now again one more developer. - Mondrian is ported to Squeak by Lukas Renggli. It is not a 1:1 port, more a Squeak specific evolution, but in principle has the same functionality then the original Mondrian for Visual Works. Scripting is not compatible, but if there is interest to do so it can be done. - OmniBrowser roadmap is in discussion. Regards Hans

1 0

2006-11-01 SqF board notes
by Craig Latta 04 Nov '06

04 Nov '06

Hi all-- Thanks to those of you who have submitted agenda item suggestions! (See [1].) Please keep them coming! The Squeak Foundation board meets online for one hour on the first and third Wednesday of each month. At the 2006-11-01 meeting, Bert, Craig, Tim and Yoshiki attended; Cees and Marcus were absent. *** There were three action items from the previous meeting. 1. Craig will prepare a tentative official contributor list and make it available to the community and to Viewpoints. I have compiled all the contributor information mentioned on squeak-dev into a set of objects. I periodically get the objects to print themselves on [2]. Please do check that list and let me know of any corrections or additions. Note the intent is to mention only people who have at least one method in any Squeak release. I intend to make the objects themselves available soon, stay tuned. Special thanks to Jecel Assumpção Jr., Ken Causey, Stephane Ducasse, Göran Krampe, Pavel Krivanek, John McIntosh, Andreas Raab, and many other individual contributors for their help! I would like to emphasize that, while it is apparently the intent of Viewpoints Research Institute to use an Apache-style license for their OLPC project software, the Squeak Foundation board has not yet decided the license of any future Squeak release. The current license ("Squeak-L") would seem to be the default, but we know from previous community discussions that there is a great deal of support for an MIT-style license, and there are other options (e.g., APSL). Personally, I think that we ought to look at the Apache license very closely and consider the possibilities; I haven't done this myself yet. 2. Craig will make a call for volunteers for the release team. I made a call for release team volunteers on 2006-10-06. So far there have been... zero volunteers. :) If you've held off volunteering because you were wondering who else might volunteer, please just volunteer. :) We decided that the timeout for release team volunteers after the first call will be two months (some thought one month wasn't long enough). So, we intend to decide who the release team is by the end of the 2006-12-06 board meeting. There seems to be a very real possibility that we will still have no volunteers at that point. We decided that, if that happens, we will cancel the 3.10 release and move on to 4.0. Apart from being merely pragmatic, this might motivate a few people :). 3. Cees will make another gentle reminder to Jochen about the wiki move. Cees wasn't at the meeting, so we postponed this item. *** The meeting had seven agenda items. 1. What shall we do about the upcoming loss of the Georgia Tech swiki? 2. How shall we ensure reliable access to the Squeak website and our other servers? We deferred these items because Cees wasn't there. 3. How shall we become independent from ESUG? I suggested that we incorporate the Squeak Foundation as a non-profit corporation, so that people can make tax-free donations to it. I mentioned that I had found a law firm that would (for about USD 1500) guide us through the process of both incorporation and obtaining 501(3)(c) status with the US IRS. Others recalled that Cees thought it would be better to incorporate in Europe, but weren't sure of his details. None of us knew whether it was possible for a single corporation (with any country of origin) to accept donations that were tax-free for donors of all countries. I mentioned that this is probably the sort of thing that the aforementioned law firm would know. I mentioned that we might very end up wanting to establish multiple entities in different regions. We agreed it would be best to have unanimous board agreement on this issue, and that we would discuss it further via email. 4. How should the community support the release and harvesting process? Stef suggests establishing test and build servers. 5. Matt asks that we consider declaring a documentation policy, in which each SqueakMap package has at least a minimal usage description, a la the TalkBack package. We deferred these items because time was running short. 6. How shall we create an archive of board meeting notes and team progress reports? We decided to just put these things on a passworded wiki page (much like minnow operates now), and deal with whatever vandalism occurs. 7. What shall we do with regard to merchandising? We ran out of time and deferred this item. *** The action items from this meeting were: 1. Craig will make a second call for release team volunteers. 2. Craig will make the contributor objects available in addition to the textual summary. 3. The board will discuss incorporation further via email. 4. Craig will create a tree of passworded wiki pages for board meeting notes and team status reports. 5. Cees will make another gentle reminder to Jochen about the wiki move. *** Currently, the next agenda is tentatively: 1. What shall we do about the upcoming loss of the Georgia Tech swiki? 2. How shall we ensure reliable access to the Squeak website and our other servers? 3. How shall we incorporate? 4. Ken Causey suggests that someone from the board help guide discussion on squeak-dev (e.g., the recent Morphic/eToys threads; see [1]). 5. How should the community support the release and harvesting process? Stephane Ducasse suggests establishing test and build servers. 6. Matt asks that we consider declaring a documentation policy, in which each SqueakMap package has at least a minimal usage description, a la the TalkBack package. 7. What shall we do with regard to merchandising? thanks! -C [1] http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/64.html [2] http://netjam.org/squeak/contributors -- Craig Latta http://netjam.org/resume

2 1

JPEG patent issue
by karl 03 Nov '06

03 Nov '06

I just read this: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/11/02/2254224.shtml Is this a issue for the Squeak JPEG compression lib ? Karl

3 3

What happened to the SqueakDoc swiki ?
by karl 03 Nov '06

03 Nov '06

I was updating links from squeak.org to the new wiki.squeak.org and noticed some links to the old SqueakDoc swiki were dead. http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/SqueakDoc.11 Anybody have any info or a backup of these documents ? Karl

1 0

windows and quicktime plugin
by John M McIntosh 03 Nov '06

03 Nov '06

I'm looking for someone to help compile the sophie quicktime plugin for windows for Squeak & Sophie. This plugin enables quicktime on windows to draw a frame to a squeak surface, and to signal a semaphore when quicktime has rendered a new frame. Due to time constraints I'm not quite interested in loading a windows compiling environment and wresting with the Redmond masters. However I'm sure there are one or two squeak member who have in the past compiled windows squeak plugins that would like to help. -- ======================================================================== === John M. McIntosh <johnmci(a)smalltalkconsulting.com> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com ======================================================================== ===

2 1

Tests and software process
by Ralph Johnson 03 Nov '06

03 Nov '06

Squeak comes with a large set of SUnit tests. Unfortunately, some of them don't work. As far as I can tell, there is NO recent version of Squak in which all the tests work. This is a sign that something is wrong. The main purpose of shipping tests with code is so that people making changes can tell when they break things. If the tests don't work then people will not run them. If they don't run the tests then the tests are useless. The current set of tests are useless because of the bad tests. Nobody complains about them, which tells me that nobody runs them. So, it is all a waste of time. If the tests worked then it would be easy to make a new version. Every bug fix would have to come with a test that illustrates the bug and shows that it has been fixed. The group that makes a new version would check that all tests continue to work after the bug fix. An easy way to make all the tests run is to delete the ones that don't work. There are thousands of working tests and, depending on the version, dozens of non-working tests. Perhaps the non-working tests indicate bugs, perhaps they indicate bad tests. It seems a shame to delete tests that are illustrating bugs. But if these tests don't work, they keep the other tests from being useful. Programmers need to know that all the tests worked in the virgin image, and that if the tests quit working, it is there own fault. No development image should ever be shipped with any failing tests. -Ralph Johnson

10 22

Ownership of The Squeak Kernel and Brand
by Laurence Rozier 03 Nov '06

03 Nov '06

All, I think this is an important topic to discuss regardless of what position one takes. Not discussing it isn't likely to make the issues go away or get handled in a manner agreeable to most. Even when there is a unified kernel that projects like Croquet, Sophie, Seaside, OLPC et al can chooose to build off of, it will still be possible to have variations. While one can choose to make a case that there need not be a single kernel, that doesn't address the brand issue. What will "Squeak kernel" mean if the one downloaded from squeak.org isn't the same as the one downloaded from squeakland.org? Which "Squeak kernel" will Croquet, Sophie et al build from? The way I see it, in the more organic, "live" econet Spoon will enable, there's no need to have a single kernel - objects can modify behavior in whatever ways their creators see fit to allow. However, I think it would be much better for all if there is only one kernel with the word "squeak" in because people(that is who all of this is for after all) prefer reasonably unambiguous terminology. There are lots of ways to work this out in my view, but they all require dialog amongst the key stakeholders. That need not take place here, but I'm hoping(and requesting in the case of the Squeak Board which I voted for) that the stakeholders provide some public feedback as to whether they are willing to discuss it offline. Thoughts and comments welcome, on or offlist. TIA, Laurence

4 3

Best package to build simple web service
by Chad Nantais 03 Nov '06

03 Nov '06

I want to build a simple web service that lets clients fetch rates (returned in custom XML) by sending a REST request. Very basic stuff. What's the easiest package with which I can create an XML web service? Swazoo? Kom? Thanks.

2 1

Jump to page: