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It would be nice to see Pillar return to being a cross platform project as well. One of the beautiful things about Seaside/Magritte/Pier was it’s compatibility across many dialects of Smalltalk. The “develop in Pharo and deploy in GemStone” was a big draw for me :) One of my clients uses VW so it was great to have these projects there as well. Yes but at the end of the day. You see we cannot work for free and in addition got constraints that are dragging us behind. Absolutely! Luckily the hard work of cross-compatability has already been done for Pier. I’m just hoping we can keep the parts of Pillar on which Pier is reliant working across dialects - Pharo and GemStone at least. From memory, the only thing that made it hard was PRTParametrizable.

I imagine very few of us are being paid for the contributions we make. In my case, it’s only when I have a paid project that allows me to work in Smalltalk, that I can invest some of that paid time in contributing towards the packages I’m using for that project.

Which packages?

I also feel my smalltalk-ability isn’t up to the standard of so many of the amazing people contributing, which makes me a little reticent to get involved in the more complex projects. You see fixing a comment or adding a test should be possible. Don't hide yourself behind this argument.

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I will see if the trait usage make sense and can be removed. But you see if everything we do has to be compatible better be dead. Maybe not a matter of code or die, but certainly a matter of style and most likely a commitment to more pain. it is (sometimes much) harder working with community projects since it takes working with that community - and everyone has their own use case, and at least three opinions. :)

I’ve experienced this many time in non-software projects. It may take a little longer to get there, but it’s definitely worth the extra pain it in the end.

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I would prefer to see GS having an infrastructure to load Pharo kernels. We are pushing the bootstrap for this reasons. Dale and the GemStone team are doing a great job moving towards that ideal. Their constraints are even greater since they have a large commercial install base supporting many platforms. Come on. Pharo too and we have far less ressources!!!

We should be able to be more flexible and dynamic

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Because you see Pharo will use more and more slots because they are really really cool and powerful. What do you do with Pillar? Because I write books, slides, and websites so this is an important piece of software for me. For me, Pillar was a package in Pier, and Pier was a tool that I used for all my presentations, prototyping, and small or short-lived community and not-for-profit projects. Ok then you can still use an old version of Pier and hope that others will do what you want.

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I’d like to see Pier get some love - it’s an awesome tool. How can I help? Join and hack. I’d love to! I noticed that the issue tracker and other Pillar related stuff is now on GitHub which is awesome. Is there any chance that the Smalltalk project could also move there? It would make it easier to fork and hack and make versions available to test before deciding what might be valuable pushed back to the core project. Why easier? You cannot produce a slice? Seriously I will not move pillar to github before Pharo has a fully working solution. And I will maintain pillar but I need time.

Thanks for all your excellent work with Pillar - not to mention everything else!

Have fun!

Jupiter