On 3/10/14 14:58, J.F. Rick wrote:
Hi Esteban,
seconding your points, it is important to acknowledge why a solid
Pharo core is important and worth striving towards even if it can be
painful. First, read Bret Victor's reflection on Doug Englebart:
http://worrydream.com/#!/Engelbart <http://worrydream.com/#%21/Engelbart>
He makes the case that the vision that drove Englebart was important
to how he realized things, giving the specific example of how his
video conferencing system was fundamentally different than today's
screen sharing technology. Today's screen sharing is basically a nice
hack onto an existing single user system. Simply doing what Englebart
did would require a lot of restructuring at the foundation. With
Pharo, we have the possibility to really build / refactor from the
ground up, building a fundamentally better foundation, ultimately
making cool things possible. For my own work, I'm excited about the
possibility of building a new multi-touch implementation from the
ground up. That said, the current Pharo foundations have a number of
problems for me:
(1) Graphics are still based on BitBlt, which is slow and ugly. Moving
over to Athens will address this. While I have successfully used
Athens graphics, I still get VM crashes (which are probably due to
Athens as I did not get the crashes beforehand).
When you get them can you report to see what we can do?
(2) Sound does not really work. On 64-bit linux, I can't simply play a
recorded file as the sound plug-ins really only work for a 32-bit system.
yes yesterday olivier was trying on linux and "alsa" seems oldish now
(3) Event handling does not get touch events. I've hacked this so far
but a sustainable solution would be great.
Did you check the new OSWindow because
We should now integrate and replace the old events system to use OSWindow
(4) Packages do not facilitate transfer of resources. For my purposes,
I need to add images and sound to a package. This is not really
possible right now.
I was synching with Max about the status of libgit and he continues to
make progress so we will get there.
I am willing to help on these problems for the community but sometimes
I need support, especially when C code is necessary, rather than Pharo
code. For instance, if I could get a VM that gives me raw touch events
into Pharo, I could take (3) from there. I'd also be willing to work
on (4) but I could use some help. One intimidating part is that there
are so many package managers for Pharo. It might be nice if we
simplified down to one: the right one.
Anyway, you can count me in for some contribution back to Pharo core
but I might need some support from Pharo central and it won't happen
for at least another month as I'm just getting set up in the new
location (e.g., no access to a multi-touch device).
Let us know and we will see how to help you.
I cannot open Pharo for now because I'm not allowed by Pomodoro :) if
you see what I mean. No fun allowed.
But after I want to see the new events and how to remove the old one.
Igor told me that they plugged the new ones into morphic
so I should check. (because in the process we never integrated the
cleans I did and that we never finished - that is life).
Cheers,
Jeff
On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 7:44 AM, Esteban Lorenzano <esteba...@gmail.com
<mailto:esteba...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi,
I'm writing this because I'm sad about what is happening in this list.
I'm seeing a lot of general negativity and non constructive ways
to discuss things.
I'm also seeing more and more people using Pharo for their
particular interests (which is of course a good thing) but less
and less people who contribute back to Pharo.
Finally, I'm seeing more frequently an attitude of "customer",
more than the conviction than this, Pharo, is also yours...
Please people, we (the pharo "core" team) cannot do everything. We
do not have the manpower or the resources to hire manpower. We
would like, but we just do not have the resources (is already a
blessing that we can work on this, for now: INRIA is paying, but
what it pays is *research*, not "pharo the language", so this is a
collateral advantage....)
So, having an OPEN SOURCE project, with limited resources means
that there is a lot of things that depend on the community.
It depends on the community not just to fix, but to enlarge the
ecosystem in general too.
So, I refuse to believe that we cannot be a cool and helpful
community.
I refuse to believe that general negativity and bad humor can
overcome the joy of participating in this collective effort.
So, here some recommendations for enhance the way we participate:
- Be positive. Just "this is a s**t" does not help. Even if it is.
- Be propositional. Just "this is a s**t", and not telling what
you want/prefer does not help.
- Be proactive. Just "this is a s**t", and not report, discuss and
(at least time to time) provide a fix/enhancement does not help.
In conclusion: not helping does not help :)
After all, this is the "pharo-dev" list. I mean, the list of
people wanting to participate from this great, community effort.
cheers,
Esteban, still grateful of belonging to this community
--
Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D.
http://www.je77.com/
Skype ID: jochenrick
