Things burning

• We don't know who is doing what! Sub project tracking. (a lightweight possible approach is that the Coordinators keep track of project and team leader and maintains status/contact)
• We don't have a proper packaging scheme in the image yet! (Decide on how to deal with PI/Alexandre's new Package stuff for packages in Squeak)
• Harvesting is standing still! Get harvesting and Mantis fixed/kicked into gear in 3.9 as the process stands right now.
• Harvesting and bug tracking in general is broken! Improve the whole harvesting/bug tracking process. It doesn't really work right now.
• Parts of the image are highly unmaintained, but there are willing people! (Move forward with TFNR thus delegating areas to other people to maintain and relieve harvesting too in the process).
• The image is crufty! Getting rid of old cruft. Maybe start accepting code from cleanup efforts for the next unstable series with a lower level of review.
• Lack of visibility of packages! They aren't "there" in the image, the tools for loading them are not that visible either and even if you find SMLoader it is hard to know what is what. (TFNR will make things more equal, deps will make distros usable and enable us to make better usability features, perhaps a Wizard to find packages? Ned's distros sounds very much like Lex's universes I think)
• Breakage because of missing dependency model! Something is changed and not all dependents are updated because we don't know who they are. SM should handle this.
• Packages second citizens to "in image packages"!. TFNR makes all citizens second. :) No, but having everything be packages is key. And united bug/fix tracking for packages.
• No idea of who uses what! This is something we also need to address in SM/packages/whatever we end up using. Feedback.
• No idea of what works ! Dependencies and above all configurations which are user tested combinations of package releases fed back into SM. And universes/distros which would be "larger tested wholes".
• No way to commit to actions!, or the "who is working on fixing that?"-problem. (TFNR makes responsibility clear, use Mantis or other to assign to people, Tasks/Teams) More ideas? How about mapping Tasks/Teams in SM too?
• Excessively conservative update stream/no internal stream! (there is one now, but the issue probably remains)
  • less tested updates when they go out (no testbed)
  • slow updates (the conservatism)
• Dead/unmaintained code! TFNR is probably the antidote - someone must have responsibility and ownership/maintainership. Every piece of code should be mappable to an SM Account.
• The squeak-dev list is frequently over the heads of non-programmers! (and useful stuff for non-programmers is drowned)
• Non-programmers have a hard time helping out! (Need to make it easy to do: testing, documentation, reorgs and packaging (UI stuff like menues etc), artwork)
• Newbie programmer Squeakers have a hard time helping out too! (hard to know where to start, mentoring?)
• Social model malfunctional! Quote: "If we had designed (say) a network communications protocol as carelessly as we've designed the social protocol of the Squeak community, we would have been fired or ignored." (antidotes seem to come back to previous listed things like feedback and knowing who is doing what and responsibilities and more, but the problem is wide and diverse)
• The problem of merging back in! When you use a package, fix stuff in it - how do you get feed back into the upstream package? Relates to "unofficial releases" that was written about on SqP and SM should support.
• Embracing distros/universes! Quote: "I suggest that we acknowledge the existence of specialized versions of Squeak and encourage the definition of others as their user communities come forward to take responsibility for doing that work. I will use the term "distribution" here to refer to a particular image, and its code and other packaged content. Each distribution has downloadable versions that people can get and use immediately."
• What is happening!!! A single RSS pulse for all Squeak forum? Very nice idea.
• We have no release synchronization! SmallLand, Squeakland, Squeak, Croquet etc.
• Documentation sucks! Swiki is a wealth of info, but hard to follow/read. Tutorials, getting started etc. We have stuff but spread out and not updated etc. Class comments are still generally poor. And so on.
• Usability sucks! Well, the general Squeak dev environment really could use a loving hand in at least arranging things better in menues etc. Currently it is pretty wild grown.