Squeak Board minutes – 10/15/2012

Present: Craig Latta, Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Levente Uzonyi

– There are plans to replace squeak.org with a new site based on Colins Altitude web-framework.  The SFC has suggested including a flattr contribution on member-project web-sites, which will be considered for the new site.

– A continuation of last Saturday’s Squeak hangout discussion occurred where Tim Rowledge presented a discussion about transparent access to native OS processes from within the image.

– Meanwhile, Craig is planning his next release of Spoon, which is becoming ready for mainstream consumption.  This project will be very exciting for Squeak as it promises to help address many long-time concerns of the community such as modularity, distribution and scale.

– 4.4 is planned for release this month while energy is building for 4.5.  Colin wants full Environments in 4.5, as well as adoption of his FileSystem framework.  Chris wants Themes so the look of the system can be more easily customized and also inclusion (or easy loadability) of the latest Refactoring Engine.  We also want to finally begin purging long-deprecated code.

– While there is a lot of work to be done, a general feeling of satisfaction with Squeak’s status, capability and future potential was expressed.

Squeak Board minutes – 10/1/12

All members were present: Chris Cunnington, Bert Freudenberg, Craig Latta, Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Randal Schwartz, Levente Uzonyi

– The next Squeak Community Meeting is on 13 October. Find a web cam and join us in a fun Google Hangout! [1]

– We are happy to see the work on Squeak 4.4 being in the home stretch now, looking forward to the release

– Ideas are collecting for Squeak 4.5, such as including a full Environments implementation and removing deprecated code.

– Traits were discussed. We would like to know about Squeak projects that use Traits for development, or about other packages that use Traits.

– Squeak took possession of a new Virtual Server from Gandi.net [2] provided courtesy of our legal home, the Software Freedom Conservancy [3]. The existing Jenkins server [4] will be moved over to the new location and expanded to manage more jobs. Those jobs will not just be for running tests on the trunk image, but for virtual machine compilation. It is to be hoped that having a working start-to-finish build script that anybody can run will help to document the process and make it more accessible to all Squeakers.

– The Softlayer server is still waiting on approval from its legal department and is expected to arrive in the near future

– We briefly touched the subject of marketing/promoting Squeak to the wider world. One idea is to create greater visibility for the projects members of the community are working on, which is one of the objectives of the Squeak Community Meetings on G+. Since we ran out of time we will return to this topic at our next meeting.

[1] https://plus.google.com/events/c0nfhlfod6ogn3aumsq6seda7g8

[2] http://www.gandi.net/

[3] http://www.sfconservancy.org/

[4] http://squeakci.org/