Squeak Board minutes – 11/19/12

Members attending: Bert Freudenberg, Colin Putney, Chris Muller, Randal Schwartz, Chris Cunnington, Craig Latta

– Squeak4.4 is going to be released soon

– The election process is being reviewed to secure an election manager so Göran doesn’t have to do it forever

– David T. Lewis set up automatic building of 64-bit images [1], and Ian Piumarta provides a Linux VM to run these images [2]. The Board explored what could be done with such an image. The main thing it allows is having larger object memories. One idea was a system that would log all message sends and state changes, so we could have an omniscient debugger (e.g., a person could play back everything that happened in the previous half hour). This relates to Gilad Bracha’s blog post “Debug Mode Is The Only Mode” [3]. One thing necessary for a wider adoption of 64-bit images would be providing VMs for Windows and Mac, and making some remaining plugins work with 64-bits.

– Craig Latta is about to release the first modules for the Naiad module system for Spoon: Chronos and Quoth. Craig has a process of “spoonifying” an application written in regular code. Chronos is Alan Lovejoy’s date/time library [4] and Quoth is Craig’s own musical live-coding system [5].

– Tim Rowledge is waiting to receive in the mail a Raspberry Pi with which he aims to provide a current RiscOS platform for Squeak. Being the original ARM maintainer of the Squeak VM, he intends to adapt his existing RiscOS code for the Raspbery Pi.

– Colin Putney  is in the process of reviewing and releasing a new revision of Filesystem [6]

– Chris C. has developed a prototype of a new squeak.org homepage. It’s latest version can be found at [7]. It is an Altitude website. There are questions about the site on two fronts: how it looks; and, how stable it is. There has been doubt about how the site should look. Opinions about its design, logo, layout, CSS, etc. are welcome. Herbert Konig is helping to harden it with the Selenium testing suite. [8] [9] The most recent image has been up for +200 hours without a problem. Colin has added changes to Altitude, which will be deployed soon.

[1] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2012-November/166422.html

[2] http://squeakvm.org/unix/

[3] http://gbracha.blogspot.ca/

[4] http://chronos-st.blogspot.com/

[5] http://netjam.org/quoth/

[6] http://wiresong.ca/filesystem/

[7] http://box3.squeak.org:8624

[8] http://seleniumhq.org/

[9] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/selenium-ide/