Attending: Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Levente Uzonyi, Chris Cunnington

• it was agreed that was nice to see Eliot exploring the SqueakCore image, as we hope this is a direction the community will take up
• a long conversation was had about how to distribute the next version of OmniBrowser, as existing tools don’t seem quite right
• a long Installer script could be written, but that meant every version would have its own, and managing them would be a nuisance
• Metacello was seen as good, but that it would be better if the metadata/dependency info could be accessible; so you could ask questions of the metadata
• the difference between the needs of users and developers was raised
• the next OmniBrowser will have around 30 packages to co-ordinate and likely more
• Colin’s working on a DSL and tool to manage the task for his own personal use: a tool that reads a spec and creates an Installer script
• Levente suggested a tool to read a Metacello configuration to make a spec to feed into Colin’s tool and then produce an Installer script
• it was mentioned that a build server factors into these problems and could assist the process

- The problem resulted from the domain squeakfoundation.org which made a change to its DNS configuration 2 Jan.

- After the problem is solved, the SOB is resolved to switch over to squeak.org and make squeakfoundation.org redundant to needs

- The relationship with the Software Freedom Conservancy was discussed in terms of who is a signatory for the Board. It seems the SFC is the signatory and not SOB memebers

- an important bug fix by Colin Putney will be incorporated into the release of Squeak 4.3

- Some final tasks related to the release of Squeak 4.3 were discussed: the creation of an All-In-One release; uploading a zipped version of that and a zipped SqueakCore image to http://ftp.squeak.org /4.3; and then linking from the homepage of squeak.org to that All-In-One app

Welcome to the release of Squeak 4.3.

There aren’t any applications bundled with this release. Instead of working on applications to bundle with the image, core developers have been inspired by the Cog virtual machine to look deeply into the image for things they wanted to change. As a result, the image is becoming smaller, tidier, and nimbler.

There are five Welcome Workspaces in Squeak 4.3. The second is called Future Directions:

- This image is ~15M. If you execute – Smalltalk unloadAllKnownPackages – it will become ~10M

- A SqueakCore image is available at http://ftp.squeak.org/4.3

- A reasonable target is the creation of a smaller image, which may be a task before the community

- A place to explore where to make reductions is likely the removal/replacement of GUIs

- Once we have a smaller core image, we can employ Andreas Raab’s memo [1] on how to load code back into the image. This will be based on tests delineating the separate responsibilities of core and application developers

[1]]http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2010-May/150658.html
Happy Holidays Hacking,

the Squeak Oversight Board

- 4.3 is released at the next SOB meeting — 20 Dec.

- a new release of Magma is coming

- the billing for the Squeak server may switch from Squeak Germany to the SOB directly

- owing to other commitments Jecel has had to push back making a report of various virtual machine usage on Linux

We used Google Hangout for the first time, so we had a real “face-to-face” meeting. The minutes were taken live with Google Docs in the G+ hangout by several people at once

Randal reported that he’s in the process of surveying the current server situation, and will produce a definitive document about the state of things. (And then he accidentally got himself booted from the chat, so we figured out how to re-add someone who has left.)

Jecel talked about the ongoing research he’s doing about determining the state of the Linux distros with regard to the VM. Still working on it.

Jecel has received an email from Brad of the SFC asking about the situation with Squeak Germany and the payment of the servers. Rita (treasurer of Squeak Germany) is the right person to see about any payments we already owe, while the Squeak Germany Board and Marcus would be the ones to transfer the administration to us so we directly receive future bills to pay directly.

OmniBrowser will not be ready for 4.3; Colin is working on common core with Lucas; expect OB using ToolBuilder fixes

some complaints about ListChooser, which is maybe a year and a half in the image (and appears when searching for a class)

a discussion about notifications and the user interface and how that can make problems (or not) for automating the build of an image

there was a discussion about Preferences and some desire to change the scope of Preferences between 4.3 and 4.4; perhaps get rid of some preferences

have community versus officially supported packages. Community supported would be packages with no given owner or the owner has moved on from the community, while leaving a valuable body of code that should not be allowed to rot away. Official packages would be ones that have passed tests and are assured to work with the latest core image

the feature freeze comes down on the 4.3 release process today.; the code freeze after the next SOB meeting

the SOB was pleased to see the creation of a Squeak G+

• owing to an echoing audio problem in Teleplace part of the board meeting was used creating a Google Plus circle, which seemed to work to everybody’s satisfaction

4.3 Release News:

• feature freeze in two weeks; the code freeze in four
• the OmniBrowser will work in 4.3 before the feature freeze
• a rewrite of the Squeak Map server is available as an image for exploring on localhost at http://www.16r.ca/SMView.zip  which may be incorporated into 4.3 release plans
• a SqueakCore image is now available at http://ftp.squeak.org/4.3alpha/

VMs, Linux, & Distribution:

• Colin talked to Esteban about vm packaging, who is busy with Smalltalks 2011 at the moment, so we’ll know more in the near future
• Jecel will have the report on Linux VMs ready next Wednesday on Squeak-dev

Notes on the 4.3 release:

- this won’t be the Cog release because of the needs of Linux which might not be aware of a sudden change

- Jecel is going to look at Linux distros and the vms they use

- Colin will talk to Esteban about multiple versions of the vm and get the OmniBrowser to run on 4.3

- Chris C. will go through the Daily Commit Logs back to the last release to compile a list of changes to the 4.3 release

Notes on Package Management ( Or, what would need to happen for Nicolas Cellier to  take Complex out of the image?):

- The question was discussed if Squeak Map would be used for package management or not in future

- In the future Squeak Map may be the tool that lists packages that conform to a series of tests which are a de facto contract between developers and core contributors

- If that’s the case, Squeak Map needs some work. But owing to some low profile changes that have already been made to Squeak Map, perhaps not as much as one might expect

• Some ideas about the coming 4.3 release were explored: it’s a maintenance release

• It was suggested that as part of the 4.3 release a communications effort, a clear message, needs to be performed about the future goals of the Squeak image.

• It is currently 16M. If you execute “Smalltalk unloadAllKnownPackages” it will take fifteen seconds and become 9.8M

• A reasonable target for a core image is 5M, so a drop of 4.8M from the current image  (at 9.8 M) is a task before the community

• A place to explore where to make reductions is likely the removal/replacement of GUIs

•  Once we have a smaller core image, we can enact the memo Andreas wrote on how to load code back into the smaller image. This will be based on tests which will clearly delineate the responsibilities of core developers and application developers

• The relationship with the Software Freedom Conservancy is working as the process of disbursing funds has been shown to work.

• It was agreed that the Software Architecture Group at Potsdam does great work and we should find a way to draw more attention to it, perhaps on squeak.org.

• It was acknowledged that these days in open source Smalltalk there is a great deal of effort going into the VM, which is a great thing. And it was posited that when this burst of VM creativity eases, there will likely be a surge of changes in the image reflecting the new possibilities.

• The release of a 4.3 image of Squeak is beginning to gather its materials.

• A discussion on the state of the Squeak community was had.

• Bert and Chris C. returned from ESUG.  Quality of attendance was expressed as one of several highlights.

• The future of SqueakSource was also discussed. The plan is to employ an updated SqueakSource running on GemStone in the near future at http://ss3.gemstone.com with the mirror in Chile remaining unchanged. The squeaksource code repository is important to the Smalltalk community as a whole, and so it is very nice that GemStone has taken on this responsibility.

• Bert has a change set that can make a trunk image work on iPad like the Etoys image works on the iPad and he is considering merging those changes into the trunk image. http://etoys.squeak.org/experimental/ipad/