I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the Pharo development/ maintenance process is supposed to work. Most of these seem to be missing info on the wiki which merely need fleshing out there, I would update the wiki pages myself if only I knew what to write... Please bear in mind that I'm a newbie to Squeak, so some of these questions may be rather naive. One of my motivations is to evaluate the future viability of Pharo as a vehicle for commercial applications and whether it warrants to lobby for resources being allocated to its development. So here goes: The wiki mentions 'kernel' and 'MiniImage' as not being in scope of Pharo. What does that entail, does this mean that discussions about allowing nil in Sets are out of scope? What is the status of the dev-image? As delivered the tools are broken (because context menus on the source pane raise an UHE that is induced by OB-Enhancements, issue 904), is it actively used by the main committers or is the core image the place to be? Even more confusingly the above issue has been marked as fixed this night but if I do a World->System->Software Update the bug persists in my image. When I looked into fixing it myself I got confused (because I looked at InstallScript.st), it seems the code comes from various repositories -- not a single Pharo respository/branch. Are these various repositories Pharo-specific and maintained over Pharo-Inbox or do I need to submit fixes to different places? I guess as a Squeak newbie I need a high-level overview on the wiki on how code and fixes flow within Pharo, towards Squeak and towards the various tool maintainers (and back to Pharo of course, the upstream/ downstream story). What is the story when such tools and Pharo become incompatible and need to fork (or are they already forked)? Is there a vision on long-term support? Pharo wants to be agile and be free to change at will (IMO a good decision) but if it is to be viable at my job there need to be versions that receive long-term support (the 'professional' aspect of Pharo). At least bug fixes (and hopefully speed enhancements) need to be ported back to an 'LTS' release for quite a while (I'm thinking three to four years here) and on a consistent/reliable basis if Pharo is to be viable for the kind of projects I work on. Porting our projects (and project specific tool enhancements) forwards turns out to be very expensive (even in a 'conservative' environment like VisualWorks) so a mechanism needs to be in place to avoid needing too many porting moments over the lifetime of our projects (think 10+ years). The process of updating the dev image is excruciatingly slow, is this normal? The process seems to be CPU bound and takes ages for what I consider a small amount of changes - in its current state it would be unusable for the process we use at work, it will need to be brought back to well under a minute as opposed to the twenty (or so) minutes it took me yesterday. What is the background and vision for the future on this issue? Let me finish with a quick and easy newbie question: where do I find the profiler tools for Pharo? Thanks! Reinout -------