Meeting Report for 4/21/2010

Last week we decided to do notes in a round-robin manner, so Bert is writing the report this time. Everyone except Randal was present (Andreas, Bert, Chris, Craig, Jecel, Juan).

First we had some virtual champagne over the 4.1 release. Yay! Might need a little more publicizing though.

Joining the SFC is still a top-priority. We received a current draft of the agreement. We are putting it up here, please have a look if you are interested.

We spent some time discussing the new interest in documentation, which we are very excited about. To give this the proper visibility, we think it should be made part of the release, and also be linked directly from squeak.org. To arrive at a plan of action swifter than by week-long mailing list discussions, we suggest that the interested  folks meet on IRC soon.

Jecel pointed out that on the project list, there were few commercial applications listed done in Squeak. That might give the impression that the community was somehow opposed to commercial use, which couldn’t be further from the truth. So let’s add some commercial examples there (and if there are too many, make another page). Please send in links with a short description!

Finally we want to thank Ian Trudel for taking the initiative with surveying the community. We support the initiative, and are eager to see the results so we can take them into account in our future work.

And remember, anyone subscribed to squeak-dev can now contact the Board directly at board@squeak.org thanks to magic pixy dust sprinkled by Ken on every one of you!

Squeak 4.1 released

Squeak 4.1 has just been released. From the release announcement:

Squeak 4.1 combines the license change occurring in the 4.0 release with the development work that has been going on while the relicensing process took place.

Much of the work in this release has been focused on fundamental improvements. Major achievements are the integration of Cog’s closure implementation, the improved UI look and feel, the new anti-aliased fonts, the core library improvements, and the modularity advances.

To download the Squeak 4.1 release please visit:

http://ftp.squeak.org/4.1

The Website will be updated over the next few days to reflect the availability of Squeak 4.1.

Meeting Report for 4/7/2010

As usual these days, everyone was present in the meeting (Andreas, Bert, Chris, Craig, Jecel, Juan, Randal) with Juan being a little late due to unforeseen events and a bit of bad luck.

The meeting started with Chris asking for the board to clarify its position with regards to Pharo compatibility issues. The board agrees that compatibility is both a concern as well as desirable and that we should do what we can to avoid superficial incompatibilities. Bert pointed out that we have some control over it by adding changes done in Pharo for compatibility in Squeak.

We then discussed the current status of joining the SFC. Bradley had replied to Jecel’s note and congratulated us on the release and the new board. Unfortunately, the message got apparently stuck in the spam filters so most of us hadn’t seen it before the meeting. Our next step is to get the latest draft from the SFC, review it and then execute it. There was no progress on consolidating the financial situation since it depends on the SFC membership.

We then discussed our options and Ken’s comments regarding the board list rejection policy. After some discussion we agreed that the desirable solution is to have some sort of recaptcha for verification to contact the board but since nobody was signing up for implementing it we decided it is worthwhile to go with a low-tech solution instead and have all members of Squeak-dev be whitelisted. That way, at least all the known members of our community have a way of contacting the board directly. We have contacted Ken regarding this idea and he’s investigating the options.

We spent a good amount of time discussing the situation of external packages in Squeak. We agree that the current situation is undesirable and that hopefully something can be done about this in the 4.2 time frame but what exactly that means is unclear at this point. Some ideas have been voiced that need to be discussed more widely (i.e., on Squeak-dev).

Lastly, Bert and Andreas agreed that they’re going to blow up some crazy fireworks on July 4th.