The Weekly Squeak

Category: Squeak

  • RESTFull URL

    RESTFull

    Andreas asked the question can http://www.squeakSource.com support RESTFull URL’s

  • Removing EToys?


    There has been an interesting debate about removing EToys from the main squeak image. The debate is around the fact that Squeakland appears to be a permanent fork and if the community wants to decouple Etoys from Morphic there may be more of an opportunity to improve Morphic. Not everyone agrees with this path and its implications read more here.

  • Efficient Thread-local shared variables

    Andreas looking for help started a very interesting discussion about Efficient thread-local shared variables

  • IPOD anyone?

    [ANN] Gjallar competition! (or “How to win an Ipod”)

    goran at krampe.se

  • Image Freezing

    Your help is needed. There appears to be some trouble with new images that freeze up. This week there was some discussion about how to diagnose and solve this problem http://tinyurl.com/y6kxgl

    http://bugs.impara.de/view.php?id=4882

    Your help is needed!

    See Fix to Delay by Andreas: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-July/118942.html

    See Fix Suggestion by Adrian:

    http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2007-July/119023.html

  • Minnow Wiki

    So what’s going on with Minnow WIKI? http://tinyurl.com/tbyz5

    It’s moving? It’s changing? It’s staying the same? See if you can follow the tread.

  • Call for release team volunteers

    The Squeak Foundation board has issued a call for volunteers to create a release team to guide the development of the next version of Squeak, following the guidelines set up during the last board meeting.

    The board is
    […] looking for people who have available time, the diligence to complete a release, and a good degree of mutual trust with the community. If you’d like to volunteer, please do so here! If you have someone else in mind, please contact them privately and encourage them to volunteer.

  • Squeak Foundation Board meeting notes – October 18th, 2006

    Craig Latta posted the notes of the Squeak Foundation Board meeting that occured on October 4th. The Squeak Foundation Board meets twice a month via IM on the first and third wednesday, and Craig has been appointed to speak for the board.

    During yesterday’s meeting the following items were discussed:

    1. Squeak License: Yoshiki Ohshima mentioned that Viewpoints plans to contact a lawyer, produce a template of the new Apache-style license agreement that OLPC will use, work with the board to complete the Squeak contributor list, and act as keepers of the license agreement.
    2. Squeak 3.10: The board decided to appoint a release team for Squeak 3.10 development. The team will consist of three persons who will act mainly as integrators and avoid direct development. They can still contribute to the development effort, but such contributions will be outside the scope of the release team’s mission. They will also act as coordinators in order to solve possible conflicting contributions.
    3. Georgia Tech’s Squeak wiki: since Georgia Tech plans the retirement of the current swiki server, the Squeak wiki contents will have to be migrated to a community managed server. The board discussed possible line of actions.

    The board welcomes suggestions on possible agenda items for their meetings.

  • Squeak: toy or instrument?

    A message by Giuseppe Luigi Punzi sparked an interesting “philosophical” discussion on the nature of Squeak.

    Giuseppe remarks that for many developers who work with other languages, Squeak looks like a children toy with no serious applications built with it.

    To this Matthew Fulmer replied:

    Squeak is a toy. That is a good thing.

    Squeak is a toy, and therefore it looks like a toy. Aversion to
    toys is (in my not-so-humble opinion) the worst thing that is
    taught to programmers (adults?) today. Playing is the only way
    to make new ideas. One must enjoy playing before they can
    understand the purpose of Squeak. Until they realize “Squeak is
    a Toy, and I am OK with that”, they are missing the point. A
    clean object memory, simple syntax, and easy debugging are just
    implementation issues. The point of Squeak is to have fun
    building; after that, everything else falls into place.

    .

    This caused a follow up by Alan Kay, that wrote:

    The “other” kind of thing that “can be played with” is an
    “instrument” (musical, wood or metal shaping, etc.). Instruments are
    partly “mess around toys” and partly “serious toys”. And Art enters
    in when one starts to play on an instrument and around with an
    instrument. Dan and I had this in mind when we designed and built Smalltalk.

    Other Squeakers, both old and new, gave their contribution to the discussion.

    So, what do you think?

  • Process Woes

    Since the beginning of the month there’s been a recurring theme on the squeak-dev mailing list regarding Squeak’s development process.
    The discussions started with a message from Goran Krampe about the evolution of Squeak’s development process and how to have a more community-oriented process. Many squeakers replied to this message; this response from Ken Causey is just one of the many.
    More recently, Stephane Ducasse published a possible feature roadmap for Squeak 3.10/4.0 (with comments by Andreas Raab), while Giovanni Corriga sent a proposal for a 3.10 developement process.