> On 28 Jul 2017, at 15:13, p...@highoctane.be wrote: > > Changing too many things at once is indeed annoying. > > Now, I am ready to live with that but at one point, I think that we will have > to move to something like I see done in other fast evolving ecosystems. > > In Hadoop for example, Hortonworks (a distribution) moved to a set of slow > evolving substrate that is stable and know to stay stable for a long period > (HDFS, YARN) and a set fast moving releases for projects that do build on top > (Spark). > > Holding back on the new things makes you feel like you use a tool of the > past. Living on the bleeding edge is not doable because you need to solve too > many non business centric issues. > > There needs to be a combination. > > As far as I am concerned, I worked in 3.0 a lot, skipped the whole 4.0 ship, > embarked on the 5.0 and, albeit if I did a bit on 6.0, I may not develop > production code on it at the moment. 7.0 looks okay but there are lot of > changing things there, so, that is also too much for me. > > 6.1 can lure me in with Iceberg and 64-bit UFFI and fast inspectors on large > collections. I need a platform I can understand and build upon. > > There needs to be a semblance of LTS in this.
But even the LTS concept does not solve all problems. Every 2 years there is a new LTS, which is supported for 5 years. But in most projects (the same happened here), you are lazy and wait 5 years until you *have* to upgrade. And by then the difference between what you started with (say 12.04) and the current stable (say 16.04) can already be huge (remember, you skipped one LTS release) and the next one is already coming (18.04). Change is unavoidable, it is not just part of life, it *is* life. > Maybe a 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 story and a 7.x line with boostrap magic and what not. > > 6.x is a great platform and has a lot going for it if stable enough. > > I have projects coming my way and using Pharo is an option. Now, I need > something that is not going to shift under my feet. > > Especially if I want to embark crew along. > > Phil > > On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 11:00 AM, Serge Stinckwich > <serge.stinckw...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 9:34 AM, Hilaire <hila...@drgeo.eu> wrote: > I don't share your enthusiasm. > > I once set up a satisfactory build environment for DrGeo, based on P3. As > long as I stay with P3, I can concentrate on DrGeo code: write the code, then > fire up a build script to deploy the application. Now porting to P6 is a > pain: the infrastructure to deploy a desktop application has not evolve since > P3, I have to build again a deployment environment from scratch (VM support, > shrinked/built image, I don't know the promise of minimal image build up is > not palpable for me). > > Now If I have to spend days on that, I am not sure I will do it again, I > can't compete against other geometry application if I have to fight against > pharo too. What I want is to concentrate working on DrGeo not Pharo, sorry to > make it explicit but I can't much offer to do both. > > > I have sometimes the same concerns with Pharo or some tools of the Pharo > ecosystem. I know that we are trying to do our best and regarding the number > of core developers we have already an incredible platform. But sometimes, you > need to very simple updates and because of subtle problems with > VM/configurations/CI/ etc ... this is not that simple and we need to spend > times on boring stuff. > > There is no simple solution. > > One solution might be that the core developers only focus on core Pharo > functionalities but I think this is somewhat difficult, because most of the > dev are from RMOD. RMOD is a research unit and could not spend all his > money/effort on an engineering process. > > Another solution is to grow our community. More people, more companies to > sustain more engineers through the consortium. The more people we are able to > attract, the more people will help to develop working solutions for problems > like deployment or to have bug-fixing intermediate releases. > > This is why we all need in the community to do as much as possible > advertisements: lectures at universities, talk to your colleague about Pharo, > do demos in companies, at open-source forums, use Twitter do talk about Pharo > ecosystem, the software you are developing with Pharo. > Don't hide problems but talk about our nice platform and our community. > > We have done this with Stephane in the early days of Pharo at open-source > forums in France and I remember that you come in the community after we meet > you in one of these forums :-) > So DrGeo2 exists because of this kind of advertisement. > > Regards, > > -- > Serge Stinckwich > UCN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC) > Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk > http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/ >
