On 2006 August 19 15:49, Peter Crowther wrote: snip:
Here's an interesting question for the list members: what would it take for you to "buy in" to a central governance model for Squeak? What would it have to look like, who would have to be in it, what would it have to be doing?
As one of about 300(?) people who voted the SqF members, I'd say that each of us "bought in" the program of each of the Squeak Foundation board members (by voting for our candidates).
But, as the choice was about 7 members out of 9 candidates (BTW I just unsuccesfully tried to find a page on squeak.org listing the board members), and only few candidates provided an "agenda", I will try to be more specific in answering your question ("The Board"="The central governance model you ask about that I'd buy in"):
1) "The Board" would start with defining what Squeak is - "Squeak" as a small "SqueakCore" plus "Packages" - Unfortunately I can only be intuitive here, not saying I know what should be in "SqueakCore", likely it would be much smaller than current Squeak, without Morphic, MVC (UI loadable, is that possible?)
2) "The Board" would steer the community to achieve separating the "SqueakCore", and promote _tools_ that help achieving the separation, and "re-loadability" of some most important packages.
3) Once the separation is done, "The Board" would be repsonsible for steering "SqueakCore" _only_.
4) At this point, "The Board" would _promote_ forking SqueakCore into "BackwardCompatibleSqueakCore" and "ExperimentalSqueakCore" , and promote and work on tools that would enable porting packages from "BackwardCompatibleSqueakCore" to "ExperimentalSqueakCore". - The "ExperimentalSqueakCore" would be: - based on Spoon - support Tweak loadability :) - maybe as Goran suggested use Pepsi as VM :) - Chances are that, at this point, multiple "ExperimentalSqueakCores" would be created, forking the core further, hopefully some forks would merge and fork further, and so on, creating multiple "Boards", which of the forks would retain the honour to be named Squeak .. maybe there would be SqueakSmallland, SqueakSqueakland, SqueakDevelopers etc.
milan
My answer to the above (so that I'm not posing questions in the abstract): to buy in to a central governance model, it would have to be taking Squeak in the direction of a fast, modular, cheap runtime with good development tools; it would have to involve or have stated buy-in from my perceived major players in that arena (Bryce for Exupery, Craig for Spoon and Naiad, Tim for VMMaker, plus an appropriate module system and archive such as SM2
- MC2); and it would have to be committed to regular, incremental releases
of the smallest possible core plus a cloud of modules that are allowed to be behind the bleeding edge.
As always, my £0.02.
- Peter