The Squeak Oversight Board Blog

All members were present.  With so much going on in the community recently, we had a lively discussion in the board meeting today.  This was a make-up meeting due to an untimely outage with Google Hangouts during our normal meeting time last week.

Thank you, Ken Causey!

On March 10th, Ken officially announced his retirement as leader of the box-admins team.  Ken had been warning us for some time that he was winding down his involvement.  There is not a soul in the community who will not miss his professional-level service as our server admin.  Thank you Ken, for a job well-done.

Check out PathView

Recently Michael Perscheid announced PathView, a new IDE tools collection.  While it didn’t generate much discussion on the mailing list yet, it is very much worth having a look.  There were definite, good first-impressions about PathView expressed by the board members.

New Release 4.5 and a new squeak.org Website

The release of Squeak 4.5 coincides with a new draft-release of a new squeak.org website, led by Chris Cunnington.  Altitude is the newest web-framework under development for Squeak.  Redoing the squeak.org with Altitude lets us change up the years-old look of the old site while allowing us to exercise and grow into Altitude.

The reception to the new site has been positive.  Chris C. has responded to several change requests.  Naturally, all in the community care about Squeak’s web-presence, but updates desired by the community should not be the burden of a single individual.  The next steps are to discover what role(s) and webteam-level access permissions are needed to enable community-level participation in the new site.

Squeak 5!

There was consensus that we would like Squeak release cycles to be a bit shorter 🙂 — preferably every six months.  Eliot believes Spur, and the associated image-format changes needed to support it, will be ready well in time for the next release, which will be called Squeak 5 on account of the image-format change.  Craig’s Spoon / Naiad work might be put in as Squeak 6, then.

Squeak board minutes 2013-02-18

first meeting of term, all incoming and outgoing members invited.

present: Bert Freudenberg, Craig Latta, Chris Muller, Colin Putney, Tim Rowledge, Frank Shearer (all incoming, Tim and Frank are new)

absent: Chris Cunnington, Eliot Miranda, Randal Schwartz, Levente Uzonyi (Eliot is new, others are outgoing. Chris, Randal, and Levente mentioned they couldn’t make it, Eliot was on holiday)

closed items:

+ Decided to keep using Google Hangouts for now, although the group is willing to try Immersive Terf once, to see if its Mac audio support has improved.

+ Moved future meetings to 1st and 3rd Mondays at 7pm Amsterdam time (old schedule was 1st and 3rd Mondays at noon Los Angeles time). Frank set up a shared Google Calendar.

+ Bert updated the new-board-member info package.

+ Craig added new members to the board mailing list, Bert invited new members to edit the WordPress blog.

open items:

– Agreed we’d like to make the voter list public, allowing for individuals to opt out. It’s part of an effort to get voters to declare their connection with the project. Also, some of us are just curious who the voters are. Bert will ping the community and Ron Teitelbaum about this.

– Money. SFC is paying the Hetzner hosting bill on our behalf with the money they hold for us. Discussion of Squeak badges. Tim wonders about prior distribution numbers. Craig has the remainder, will count them. Bert pinged Giovanni about GSOC 2007 funds transfer.

– The webteam. Chris Cunnington said previously Janko has no time for this anymore, Colin had no luck reaching Janko. Colin suggests Chris Cunnington as new leader, will contact him. Colin will also ask Chris C. the status of the new website.

– SqueakSource. We’d like to replicate Berne’s SqueakSource server. We want to at least preserve the projects that are there now, and we would take control of the squeaksource.com domain name. Bert will continue to coordinate communication. Chris will review and debug the squeaksource code, and consider adding a Magma backend. Berne contacts: Oscar Nierstrasz and Fabrizio Perin.

– Google Summer of Code 2013. We’d like get some more Squeak projects started/accepted. Would Eliot like more people working on the project he proposed last year?

Members attending: Bert Freudenberg, Colin Putney, Chris Muller, Randal Schwartz, Chris Cunnington, Levente Uzonyi

– Colin and Chris Muller volunteered to be the release managers for Squeak 4.5

– we explored how the Jenkins server could send an email to Squeak-dev  when a recent update to the Trunk breaks a test.

– moving services from the current server, box2, to the two new boxes, box3 and box4, is under way

– we are talking to the managers of squeaksource.com about how to provide facilities to help people move projects to SqueakSource3.

– There is agreement that having “officially supported” packages outside the image is something everyone wants.  The new CI infrastructure could run automated tests even for these packages.