I've been skimming the ironically named "blame" thread and just want to
clear up some apparent misconceptions.
git/github is not the reason that the author/timestamps information was
"lost" ... when tonel was introduced the author/timestamp info was not
included in the format as a separately serialized file. filetree's
implementation of author/timestamp support (around for almost 6 years
now) was an annoying source of commit conflicts and often prevented
automatic merges.
git/github has perfectly functional blame support[1], so the decision to
rely on git for supplying the author/timestamp for tonel was a sound
decision. Thierry Goubier's GitFileTree[2] implementation does a very
good job of converting git author/timestamp information into Monticello
meta data, and is proof that author/timestamp information can be
extracted from a git repository.
AFAICT, the single issue here is that the code to link between git's
author/timestamp information and the in-image author/timestamp
information has not been written YET ...
git/github is not the reason that there are "1000's of files on disk".
Tonel uses a file per class format which significanly reduces the file
count for Smalltalk repositories on disk. FileTree format uses a file
per method format and for large projects leads to a large number of
files, which in and of itself is not a problem (at least for git), but
does lead to excessive disk space consumption.
SmalltalkCI[2], which provides support for Smalltalk on travis-ci[3] and
appveyory[4] was created by Fabio Niephaus an active member of the
Squeak community. Travis-ci makes it possible to run cross-dialect tests
to validate github pull requests and checkins[5] for cross-dialect
projects.
It seems that there are at least some (less vocal) members of the Squeak
community who are interested in using git.
Dale
[1] https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-blame
[2] https://github.com/hpi-swa/smalltalkCI
[3] https://travis-ci.org/
[4] https://www.appveyor.com/
[5] https://travis-ci.org/Metacello/metacello
