On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Paolo Bonzini <bonzini@gnu.org> wrote:
We think that one of the most important reasons why we failed in 2009 is that Google was looking for bigger communities that Squeak. This is why this year we all go under the ESUG umbrella. We present ESUG as the mentor organization and we cover ALL open-source Smalltalk dialects, not only Squeak. Pharo, Smalltalk/X, GNU Smalltalk, Cuis..they are all invited to participate. Also cross platform projects like Seaside, AidaWeb, Magma, etc are welcome.
Here is a list of ideas from me, all more or less involving cross-dialect pollination. Â These are based on my preferences, from most to least preferred
1) GNU Smalltalk includes a refactored version of Swazoo that supports SCGI and is also faster in general. Â Start from there and backport the changes to Squeak/Pharo. Â Use Seaside's Grease cross-dialect compatibility layer to get rid of (most of) the Sport dependency.
2) Convert existing cross-platform projects to use Grease. Â Demonstrate them using two-three dialects (VW, Squeak, GST). Â Discuss possible extensions to Grease and implement them. Â Document Grease extension based on the formalism of the ANSI standard.
3) I agreed with the FSF to relicense GNU Smalltalk's file system classes under MIT license. Â Port them to at least two other dialects (Squeak/Pharo count as one). Â Think of cool ways to use them. Â Possibly work out how to integrate them into Grease and make Seaside use them.
I think I'd be willing to be a mentor for anything Grease- or Seaside-related, though I might need to run that by my new employer depending on what the project ends up being. The above are good ideas. Also, off the top of my head: + Take the best parts of Seaside and Swazoo's HTTP protocol classes and create an HTTP package that could be optionally loaded with Grease and used by multiple projects. + Someone else suggested porting Monticello to Smalltalk/X. The same could be done for VA Smalltalk and a full port with UI for VW. + I'd really love to see a single RefactoringBrowser package that could be loaded on all the platforms using Grease. I have no idea if there's any chance of buy-in from the vendors on that one; maybe it would need a new class name prefix so it could be loaded in parallel... Those are just random mind wanderings... Julian