How can you state that the Pharo team did not ask to build a new version of Squeak? Stef was in charge of a release and was left throwing his hands up in frustration at the obstruction and inaction of the Squeak community. Fortunately, he channeled that frustration in a positive way.

From: pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr [mailto:pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr] On Behalf Of keith
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 2:11 PM
To: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr
Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Fwd: [squeak-dev] Stuff

On 16 Dec 2009, at 08:15, GeertClaes wrote:

I don't know the entire background and I most definitively don't want to
start something here but it looks like politics. The "Pharo Project" team
seems to have achieved more in 1 year than Squeak had in a decade - from my
point of view :)

Yeah but I actually had a plan, and that plan was manifest in lots of technology improvements that are external to the core. The fact that pharo core moved on, did not mean that it was leaving squeak behind, because Pharo still doesn't have have any of those improvements, you are still limping along with only one core group of developers in charge, no test tools, and none of the actual problems I need fixing have been fixed yet. (changes file limits?) We were just putting our emphasis in different places. We wanted tools like atomic loading. (unfortunately Pharo team took the expertise needed to make that happen)

People doing actual work can cope with a less than optimal core for a few years. However having package management and testing tools that work is far more useful. We did all that in the squeak community. But due to the squeak board panicing and throwing all of the 4 years of progress away because they didn't understand the extent of it. They too went back to a 3.10 base image and forked, so now it does indeed look like squeak made no progress. My point of view is that squeak has made much more progress on important things than pharo has. When I started using squeak it was unusable because it wasn't possible to load anything due to lack of documentation of dependencies. Now due to politics all of those advances have been binned and so Pharo wins by default.

There should not even be a competition. I detest competition, and because everything I have tried to do in collaboration over 4 years has ended up in a competition, this has led me to simply leave the community. In 4 years I have only ever had 2 people offer to work with me on something.

I am a bit confused what the idea of Squeak using PharoCore as the base (or
core) would be? Is the suggestion to have Squeak become a sub-project of

No the idea would be to share common core packages such as Network, Collections, Compiler, building upon usage of common packages such as MC and SUnit, which are needed for loading and testing.

Pharo, building on top of PharoCore in a similar way as Pharo (dev/web)
does? I wouldn't think the Squeak team is willing to handover the "core" to
Pharo, otherwise there would never have been a Pharo project in the first
place .... or am I barking up the wrong tree?

The Pharo team never asked for the opportunity to develop the new version of squeak if they had submitted a proposal at the time, I am sure it would have been considered. However they didn't want to be involved in the politics, and I cant say I blame them.