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/

Squeak Board minutes – 9/17/12

All members were in attendance.

– Chris Cunnington is working on securing a permanent home for the new Squeak CI server.  The move must be completed before November to avoid a service interruption.

– Once the squeakci.org and Jenkins server situation has settled and become reliable, the Squeak VM team leader, David T. Lewis, intends to set up nightly updates of the latest VM code from squeakvm.org.

– Ian Piumarta has released a new Unix VM [1]. He also started bringing the Windows VM up-to-date.

– We discussed convening at Smalltalks 2013 in Argentina as an alternative to having a separate Squeak developer conference.  There are already plans to bring together Smalltalks and the Etoys-oriented Squeakfest, so getting Squeak developers there at the same time should be fun. Please let us know what you think of this idea.

– The next Google+ Squeak Community Hangout is 13 Oct. [2]

[1] http://squeakvm.org/unix/

[2] https://plus.google.com/events/c0nfhlfod6ogn3aumsq6seda7g8
(it helps when clicking on this link to already be logged into G+)

Squeak Oversight Board minutes – 9/3/12

attending: Craig Latta, Bert Freudenberg, Levente Uzonyi, Chris Cunnington, Chris Muller

– Spoon [1] will be releasing its new version soon with a web browser interface included

– the next Squeak Community Meeting [2] on GooglePlus will be Sat. 13 Oct. at 10 am Pacific Time. (If you hit the link below, it helps if you are already logged into G+)

– Squeak 4.4 is heading towards an October release

– Chris Cunnington wants to shut down the server that currently serves squeakci.org [3] and has contacted the SFC to access some Gandi.net resources to move it over (as the SFC has a relationship with Gandi.net for its members)

[1] http://thiscontext.wordpress.com/

[2] https://plus.google.com/events/c0nfhlfod6ogn3aumsq6seda7g8/102275780496317201899

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

Squeak Oversight Board minutes – 8/20/12

Squeak Oversight Board minutes – 8/20/12

Attending: Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Chris Cunnington, Bert Freudenberg, Randal Schwartz

– details about Softlayer being Squeak’s next host are being worked through, mostly by the lawyers on both sides (it’s great to have the Software Freedom Conservancy look out after us)

– a review of the teams system is underway with an aim to update the teams, close mailing lists for discontinued teams: Release team (while there is a release manager we discuss releases on the main dev list, not a separate one), modules (should be discussed on squeak-dev, too), possibly the News team (which could be merged with the Web team), and invite new people

– documentation was discussed a good deal at this meeting: ideas about what to do with the Squeak wiki, whether to use a new wiki, putting documentation on websites, or having it in the image as comments or searchable text were explored

– Squeak By Example [1] was discussed as a good book that could be updated. As sources are on GitHub [2], forking them and updating them looks like a good idea, which would make contributing really easy

– Colin suggested hosting open Google+ hangouts for members of the community during the weeks the Squeak Oversight Board does not meet. Anybody could come, ask questions, share ideas, etc.

[1] http://squeakbyexample.org/SBE.pdf

[2] https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/SqueakByExample-english

Squeak Board meeting minutes – 8/6/12

 

– All Board members were in attendance with special guest Josh Krammes from Softlayer [1]
– Josh spoke about Softlayer’s Catalyst program [2]
– The Board had the opportunity to ask Josh questions about how Squeak and Softlayer might work together
– Josh used to work in non-profit fundraising and has some experience with our kind of community
– The Board likes the agreement and will take an opportunity to re-read the documents involved. The feeling is that a relationship with Softlayer will be reached in the near future and Softlayer will be Squeak’s new host

[1] http://www.softlayer.com
[2] http://www.softlayer.com/catalyst

Squeak Oversight Board meeting – 7/16/12

Board members present: Colin Putney, Craig Latta, Chris Muller, Levente Uzonyi, Chris Cunnington, and, special guest Ken Causey

– The topic of the meeting was moving to a new server

– There are several offers for free hosting available to Squeak

– Squeak is accepting the offer from Softlayer [1]. It is also looking at an offer related to the Software Freedom Conservancy at Gandi. [2]

– The Board realized that the moving process is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Pieces can be moved over time. Perhaps even on different servers. So, the Softlayer offer will now be accepted and closed.

– The difference between a VPS and a dedicated box was debated with Ken having strong feelings in favor of a dedicated box, as you knew better what your resources were

– Ken is willing to help make the transition to a new server given a window of ninety days, so he can contribute, while not interfering with his other commitments

– One of the early pieces to be moved will be the http://www.squeak.org image, which will be a Seaside image. The old design of http://www.squeak.org will be retired in favor of a very small website emphasizing the download of Squeak. The site will then grow into a fuller and more complete resource over time

– A major consideration in the move is the mailing lists run by the GNU Mailman [3] application. Other parts of the move are the images, FTP archive, and Mantis SQL database

– Details of the moving process will be recorded to provide documentation to assist with upkeep and any future move

[1] http://www.softlayer.com/

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

[3] http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html

Squeak Oversight Board minutes – 7/2/12

Board members present: Colin Putney, Craig Latta, Randal L. Schwartz, Chris Muller,  Chris Cunnington

– the decision on which server we will move to is getting closer. The decision will be taken by the end of the month

– one idea suggested is that we find a web designer to give the homepage a new look; Craig suggested one of the designers he knows in Amsterdam

– when the move takes place, a process using a wiki or Google Docs will be used to record what we have and how we moved what we have

– Craig is going to ESUG next month

– Spoon documentation for beginners is coming as well as Naiad, the Spoon module system, integration with GitHub

– Some ideas for using Environments posited were controlled updating of code in a deployed web image; using an Environment with the Xtreams API; loading Squeakland.org’s Etoys into a Squeak Environment

– More talking to people about a location for a Squeak specific event is underway (and Squeak may already have its first sponsor)

Squeak Oversight Board Minutes – 6/18/12

– all present except Levente Uzonyi

– Randal is talking to a person at a university about hosting a Squeak event in Los Angeles. He is also talking to the event managers of the YAPC::NA 2012 in Madison, Wisconsin held last week about their template for running a conference. (Perl is also working on its own virtual machine called Rakudo.org as part of Perl 6)

– Chris M. will be sending the revised election procedure to the SFC

– Colin will be getting the voter list and posting it on the Squeak Wiki

– Alan Kay gave a ››nice talk at the ACM’s Turing Centenary Celebration on Friday. He used VPRI’s Frank (as in “Frankenstein’s monster›”) research prototype, which is built on top of Squeak 4.3. To see the 20 minute video, choose “Extracting Energy From The Turing Tarpit››” from the playlist at the ACM’s webcast.

– still waiting on some news before we decide where the home of the new Squeak server will be

– as source control has been a topic of discussion, Gilad Bracha just made an interesting post on the topic

SOB minutes – 6/4/12

all members present

– the speed of source.squeak.org was questioned: how to make it faster; whether the new server will do that; if an archive of previous releases should be created to lessen the load

– with squeaksource.com now deprecated the move to ss3.gemstone.com is looking more imminent

– The GitHub based solution for a Smalltalk repository being worked on was discussed. It looks like a good fit for cross platform projects. It may not be so convenient as to contend with ss3.gemstone.com. GitHub as a repository is something the board will be keen to watch evolve, although there was a question as to whether we might end up using a slightly inferior tool for a unassured marketing benefit. It may be that versioning tools and marketing initiatives exist in separate domains.

– Colin is preparing to re-examine the code he has for Monticello 2. Monticello is good for smaller projects, but reaches a limit at ~1000 versions. Larger projects could benefit from MC2 ( http://www.wiresong.ca/downloads/Monticello-2.0.30.zip )

– Craig spoke about Spoon at an Amsterdam even called Appsterdam ( http://www.meetup.com/Appsterdam )