The Squeak Oversight Board Blog

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

- The Board would like to thank Frank Shearar for the great job he did as release manager of Squeak4.4. Yea!
- An election is not to far off in the future. Members of the Board will be talking to the election team about starting the process.
- There is a wiki page [1] with ideas for Squeak 4.5. Please feel free to look them over and to add things you would like to see.
- Work on the new squeak.org website is resuming after the holiday and will be completed in the next few weeks

[1] wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6189

Members attending: Bert Freudenberg, Colin Putney, Chris Muller, Randal Schwartz, Chris Cunnington, Levente Uzonyi

- Colin and Chris Muller volunteered to be the release managers for Squeak 4.5

- we explored how the Jenkins server could send an email to Squeak-dev  when a recent update to the Trunk breaks a test.

- moving services from the current server, box2, to the two new boxes, box3 and box4, is under way

- we are talking to the managers of squeaksource.com about how to provide facilities to help people move projects to SqueakSource3.

- There is agreement that having “officially supported” packages outside the image is something everyone wants.  The new CI infrastructure could run automated tests even for these packages.

Members attending: Bert Freudenberg, Colin Putney, Chris Muller, Randal Schwartz, Chris Cunnington, Craig Latta

- Squeak4.4 is going to be released soon

- The election process is being reviewed to secure an election manager so Göran doesn’t have to do it forever

- David T. Lewis set up automatic building of 64-bit images [1], and Ian Piumarta provides a Linux VM to run these images [2]. The Board explored what could be done with such an image. The main thing it allows is having larger object memories. One idea was a system that would log all message sends and state changes, so we could have an omniscient debugger (e.g., a person could play back everything that happened in the previous half hour). This relates to Gilad Bracha’s blog post “Debug Mode Is The Only Mode” [3]. One thing necessary for a wider adoption of 64-bit images would be providing VMs for Windows and Mac, and making some remaining plugins work with 64-bits.

- Craig Latta is about to release the first modules for the Naiad module system for Spoon: Chronos and Quoth. Craig has a process of “spoonifying” an application written in regular code. Chronos is Alan Lovejoy’s date/time library [4] and Quoth is Craig’s own musical live-coding system [5].

- Tim Rowledge is waiting to receive in the mail a Raspberry Pi with which he aims to provide a current RiscOS platform for Squeak. Being the original ARM maintainer of the Squeak VM, he intends to adapt his existing RiscOS code for the Raspbery Pi.

- Colin Putney  is in the process of reviewing and releasing a new revision of Filesystem [6]

- Chris C. has developed a prototype of a new squeak.org homepage. It’s latest version can be found at [7]. It is an Altitude website. There are questions about the site on two fronts: how it looks; and, how stable it is. There has been doubt about how the site should look. Opinions about its design, logo, layout, CSS, etc. are welcome. Herbert Konig is helping to harden it with the Selenium testing suite. [8] [9] The most recent image has been up for +200 hours without a problem. Colin has added changes to Altitude, which will be deployed soon.

[1] lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2012-November/166422.html

[2] squeakvm.org/unix/

[3] gbracha.blogspot.ca/

[4] chronos-st.blogspot.com/

[5] netjam.org/quoth/

[6] wiresong.ca/filesystem/

[7] box3.squeak.org:8624

[8] seleniumhq.org/

[9] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/selenium-ide/

All members were present

- Colin is reviving the Squeak G+ page as a hub for Squeak Community Meetings [1]

- The Board explored the monthly financial report provided by the Software Freedom Conservancy. With a free server and a single server costing money things look well in hand.

- SqueakSource [2] was down at the time of the meeting, which prompted a discussion of how to move packages to SqS3 [3]. It was observed that there is a Chilean mirror to SqueakSource [4]. Colin is planning to talk to Dale about how packages could be moved. Chris Muller is investigating the process also.

- The number of tests outstanding for the release of Squeak 4.4 is quite low and it is likely that Squeak4.4 will be released soon

[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/102330490592489316443/posts

[2] www.squeaksource.com

[3] ss3.gemstone.com/ss

[4] www.dsal.cl/squeaksource/

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.

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] www.gandi.net/

[3] www.sfconservancy.org/

[4] squeakci.org/

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] squeakvm.org/unix/

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

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] thiscontext.wordpress.com/

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

[3] www.squeakci.org

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] squeakbyexample.org/SBE.pdf

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

- 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] www.softlayer.com
[2] www.softlayer.com/catalyst