March 24th, 2014 — Squeak Board Meeting Minutes

All members were present.  With so much going on in the community recently, we had a lively discussion in the board meeting today.  This was a make-up meeting due to an untimely outage with Google Hangouts during our normal meeting time last week.

Thank you, Ken Causey!

On March 10th, Ken officially announced his retirement as leader of the box-admins team.  Ken had been warning us for some time that he was winding down his involvement.  There is not a soul in the community who will not miss his professional-level service as our server admin.  Thank you Ken, for a job well-done.

Check out PathView

Recently Michael Perscheid announced PathView, a new IDE tools collection.  While it didn’t generate much discussion on the mailing list yet, it is very much worth having a look.  There were definite, good first-impressions about PathView expressed by the board members.

New Release 4.5 and a new squeak.org Website

The release of Squeak 4.5 coincides with a new draft-release of a new squeak.org website, led by Chris Cunnington.  Altitude is the newest web-framework under development for Squeak.  Redoing the squeak.org with Altitude lets us change up the years-old look of the old site while allowing us to exercise and grow into Altitude.

The reception to the new site has been positive.  Chris C. has responded to several change requests.  Naturally, all in the community care about Squeak’s web-presence, but updates desired by the community should not be the burden of a single individual.  The next steps are to discover what role(s) and webteam-level access permissions are needed to enable community-level participation in the new site.

Squeak 5!

There was consensus that we would like Squeak release cycles to be a bit shorter 🙂 — preferably every six months.  Eliot believes Spur, and the associated image-format changes needed to support it, will be ready well in time for the next release, which will be called Squeak 5 on account of the image-format change.  Craig’s Spoon / Naiad work might be put in as Squeak 6, then.

7/15/2013 — Meeting Minutes

Squeak board minutes 15 July 2013

present: Eliot Miranda, Chris Muller, Frank Shearar, Tim Rowledge

The annual summertime quiet-period has struck again.

4.5 is planned for release Q4/2013.  This is a rich release with the Environments feature and significant package factorings.

Colin is in process of moving to another hemisphere, so he may not be able to respond immediately to questions about Environments.

Meanwhile, Frank continues modularisation of the image.

Eliot is back from vacation and just released new Cog VM’s.

Eliot and Craig had met at one point to discuss integration of Spoon VM changes into Cog.  Additional work is needed.

6/3/2013 — Meeting Minutes

Squeak board minutes 3 June 2013

present: Bert Freudenberg, Eliot Miranda, Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Tim Rowledge

– We had a discussion about the Swiki.  We would like to have a rich and useful wiki for the community, but there is no way around having to do some work to achieve that.  Thankfully there appear to be some easy opportunities for cleaning.  A plan was discussed:

   1) get access to the swiki image so the code and features can be improved.

   2) is the Swiki software installable and testable on 4.5?

   3) some easy cleanups seem obvious:  remove empty & clearly obsolete pages.

   4) develop guidelines about what content is needed.

   5) ask other folks to help review and clean per guidelines.

– There was a discussion about the vision and future of Squeak.  Squeak evolves naturally by the participation of community members pushing their desired features into the image.  To the extent they are acceptable to the rest of the community ensures a sufficient element of stability that allows the community to remain up-to-date and cohesive.  Meanwhile the platform continually becomes a better and better Squeak.

– Some improvements come from individuals and some are purposefully discussed and acted on as a community.  Members of the board have some ideas about this and also invite others to open discussions about this on the mailing list.  As an example, there was a recent discussion about graphical backends to support anti-aliased output.

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.

Meeting Report for January 18th, 2011

Bert, Chris, Craig, Jecel, Juan and Randal were present at this week’s Squeak board meeting.

Jecel was experiencing network-bandwidth issues for part of the meeting, and so Skype-chat was suggested as a backup alternative for future board meetings.

4.2 is still scheduled for release sometime during the week of January 31st, 2011. Then, the trunk will be reopened for new features again.

It will soon be time for the annual Squeak board election. Bert suggested we manually create a definitive list of the registered voters for the 2011 election. Randal is taking that up.

The SqueakMap server package in the source repository is not the code currently being run by the production SqueakMap server. Chris is fixing that issue.

Meeting Report for 10/5/2010

A discussion about the 4.2 release of Squeak occurred at last week’s board meeting. Andreas, Bert, Chris, Jecel and Juan were present.

The target release date for 4.2 is the first-week of December, 2010. This coincides with the boards desire to export a new release every six months as well as the need for the many accumulated enhancements applied to the image since 4.1 to be packaged and distributed to a wider audience. 4.2 is also expected to include the new Cog VM.

A wiki page has been created that identifies some of the tasks targeted for the 4.2 release, and will be kept even beyond 4.2 for the record:

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6160

If anyone has specific plans for contributing to 4.2, please feel free to share them on the wiki page or squeak-dev mailing list, so the precise shape of 4.2 will begin to coalesce.

Meeting Report for 5/5/2010

A productive meeting of the Squeak Oversight Board commenced promptly on-schedule. Randal and Juan were absent due to weather.

Resuming with the boards top-priority of the last few months, the meeting opened with a discussion of final minutiae required for Squeak’s official membership in the Software Freedom Conservancy.  Since the last meeting, board members had reviewed the final-draft document borne by several iterations between Jecel and Karen at the SFC.  Andreas was pleased by the clarity of the language in the document and the overall consensus of the board was that this artifact is complete and ready for official execution.

On a related topic, the board discussed its interest in understanding the compatibility of the Creative Commons license used by the majority of graphic-artists for their creations.  The board acknowledged that visual-appeal can have dramatic affect on new-user perceptions and, therefore, adoption.  However, given the complexity of the CC license it was decided that Jecel would consult the expertise of the SFC for advice in this matter.

Mark your calendars!  The annual, 2010 ESUG conference will commence in Barcelona, Spain, this September.  The board decided, particularly in light of what happened last year with respect to Squeak absence, that a presence at this year’s conference is useful. Bert, being the geographically closest board member to the conference, volunteered his intention to attend and present for Squeak at the conference.  Thank you Bert!

Bert also reported that Squeakland, the organization concerned with the Etoys project, at a recent board meeting decided to also try joining the SFC, instead of incorporating on their own.

Another important channel for Squeak’s interface with the world are its supporting web-sites.  Chris complained during the meeting that the “download” page of squeak.org was unnecessarily “intimidating” to new users; that some of the newer automated packaging (at least, for Windows) may have rendered this language less necessary.  In response, the other board members nominated Chris to fill, what was formerly Igor’s role as board contact for web-content related issues.  Thank you, Chris.

On the topic of being beginner-friendly, Bert noted that he liked the ProfStef tutorial available in Pharo.  We think that, or a similar tutorial might be nice to have in Squeak, too. Chris noted that Maui might be nice for that. And it would be better if it was integrated into the HelpBrowser, as Andreas remarked. Too many scattered tools make it harder to discover “the good stuff”.

For the next meeting, the board will look to Randal regarding employing recaptcha to aid in spam management, as well as a review of to-do items from 2009.