Hi, Thank you all for all your best wishes... I know, John work will be really hard to match, but he wants to pass the responsibility, and I accepted because he promise to guide me for awhile, until I can build the mac vm's... Of course, I have A LOT of things to learn, before been a good builder, but I'll do my best, so, please, be kind... it will take time, until the role is fullfilled in a satisfactory way :) Now, for the coming work, I thought on what would be the first steps... these are my ideas: 1) Create a hudson configuration for the vms, so it can be built automatically. Of course, there are two problems here: a) we need a good test batery, and the vm has not. To solve this, I think the pharo tests will ne a good "starting vm suite": If the tests succed, we can hope the vm "more or less" works. b) we need a mac hudson server. Maybe pharo guys can help here, but I dunno... 1.1) Infraestructure: we need a place were publish new built vms (John's place does not have sense any more)... do you know a place. I suppose squeakvm.org is a good place, but maybe not. Any idea? 2) 4.x series are obsolete, I will focus my work on keep up-to-date 5.x series. Merge with cog is very important here :) Also, I want to work with Eliot on his vmmaker code generation changes, but this will take more time as the code generation insights are triky. 3) Keep the vm working with new changes introduced by apple. Next year will be Lion, and before that, the new app. store... So, I think I have a lot of work to begin... please let me know if there are important things I'm missing. NOTE: As I'm learning, please, when you commit something in VMMaker who needs a special mac treatment, make a comment so I can know it... otherwise the change can be lost in the limbo... And, finally, I want to say we are all going to miss you John, and I more than anybody! Cheers, Esteban pd: btw... I will need write permission on squeakvm.org... do you know who I need to ask for? On 2010-11-21 22:42:07 -0300, John M McIntosh <johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com> said:
Ten years back I took over the role of maintaining the Macintosh VM from John Maloney. Dan Ingalls wrote a letter of responsibility for me, which I accepted and have strived to carry forward.
But it's time to assume a different role and I have asked Esteban Lorenzano to take over the build responsibility. Some of you know him already from his role in building Mars for Squeak, his presentations at ESUG conferences, and the awards he has won for his technical innovations.
It's been a fun decade & three month, lots of versions were created, Apple unlike other other OS providers has driven lots of change and excitement, now they look forward to an OS-X app store, so it's time for someone new and eager to figure out how to address that. Over that decade we've moved from 68040 based machines, thru PowerPC to MacIntel, and from OS-9 thru 7 generations of OS-X.
On Jan 1st 2011 (or earlier) I will no longer do builds or officially support the macintosh VM, I will of course help Esteban thru any difficulties in the migration of responsibilities, and I'll forward that letter from Dan, it's steeped with responsibility, a bit of honour, expectations of hours (decades?) of work, and I assure Esteban a great journey. Today for Esteban I consolidated folders of Squeak VM build memories which came to nearly 6GB of stuff, fortunately most of it is obsolete because of the Cocoa os-x V5 rewrite.
I thank the community for bearing with me for the good times and the rough times as I fought the daemons of operating system change, no doubt I'll watch how things progress, yet the responsibility for what happens will lie elsewhere.
Some close friends have asked am I giving up Squeak & Smalltalk? No it's just a change of pace, I'll be around to poke at interesting issues, and at this time I welcome any paid consulting (Smalltalk or iOS), email me if you have leads...
Over the years, Viewpoints Research Institute, ESUG and others have provide some funding for this work, I thank them for their contributions.
Any message of thanks should be send to my wife of 27 years cordelia@mac.com who has diligently support my contributions to the Smalltalk community and as a non computer person always wondered why? For Sophie we had a saying: "For the betterment of mankind" . For the folks who worked on Smalltalk, Sophie, and the OLPC they know why we do this.
To the other VM maintainers I thank them for them for the trust that I would do the right thing, so for Squeak onward we go....
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com> Twitter: squeaker68882 Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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