Thank you all for your responses, I appreciate all the good feedback around this topic.
Rather than try to address individual replies in their respective email responses, I will summary what I learned and what my thoughts are. The trend now is to use http://smalltalkhub.com/ which is a bit like a combination of GitHub (source control) and https://rubygems.org/ (library repository). There are historical precedents for why things are the way they are now: Monticello was really good when it came out and still a fairly useful tool, the nature of Smalltalk images is that all the tools tend to be inside of the image and thus there is little incentive to focus on external tools. I think the nature of the web and the power of contemporary browsers has given rise to quite advanced web applications which have been able to surpass certain tools inside of the traditional Smalltalk image (hence the topic: Github). I'm not going to list its features, anyone that isn't familiar can very easily become familiar with what it can do by trying it out, its free. There's been some confusion, probably because of my forming of the question with poor mapping from the tools that I know to what Pharo/Smalltalk has to offer... so really, there is the question of source control and sharing code between teams and developers and library hosting. Online services that leverage source control and offer tools like easy online browsing of repositories/source code as well as the ability for developers to do pull requests and code review, not to mention forking repositories and reviving dead code, documenting and bug tracking. Besides managing source code, there is the concept of libraries, which overlaps greatly with source code management, but such repositories need not have all the tools previously listed, but do need to have a way to allow developers to quickly find and tap into existing code libraries; to easily create, share and download these libraries is central such a service. In this regard I think Monticello and http://www.squeaksource.com/are the tools in Smalltalk world that map the most to that concept ( https://rubygems.org/)? (correct me if I'm wrong). I understand the image/smalltalk kernel as a self sufficient enclosed world is why live objects are possible, and that's the beauty of Smalltalk. I see there is effort to build towards a more open (in the sense of the world wide web) set of tools to manage code and libraries. I still don't understand why smalltalkhub.com is trying to be both a library and source code control tool at the same time. I think leveraging tools currently available, and which have a large user-base is better for allowing new users who come from another environment -- pretty much everyone that deals with open source web and mobile application development knows how to use GitHub. But I will stick around and see how those that know more about the Smalltalk world make their decisions. I want to see a growing and thriving ST community! Traditionally and culturally, at first glance, forgive me if I'm stereotyping, but the smalltalk world seems to be heavily biased towards academic and large proprietary enterprise tooling and development environments. I think this is a reason (among others, from what I've read around) why ST hasn't picked up steam as the WWW grew up, the developers and tools were simply not geared toward such an environment. However, while I'm guessing that most developers in ST are still heavily oriented toward enterprise platforms, we can all benefit by bringing aboard more developers and creating a large market and demand for ST developers, and I'm going to go on a limb here and say that that's not going to happen until we can integrate with the tools and culture of contemporary web development. Anyone have opinions on this? Perhaps the current tools that I've described aren't the best fit for Smalltalk, and perhaps I'm still currently limited because of my personal development culture 'up-bringing'. I would love to get to know what a more idiomatic toolset can do, as Pharo and the smalltalk environment seems to be quite powerful as is and has been for a long time, and still is ahead of many current and more popular languages and tools. There are other topics I would like to explore in more detail sometime soon: - keeping up to date documentation - creating (current) tutorials for beginners to Smalltalk - minimizing fragmentation and across Smalltalk tools & library & interpreters - evaluating tools for development community discussions that are more accessible and open to newcomers / a larger audience I hope I can get better at ST and try to contribute myself to some things that interest me more... Cheers, Victor Stan Schedule me: http://quicklyschedule.quicklyschedule.me/victor Add me to your address book - it's easy! http://contactmonkey.com/victor On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 4:32 PM, stephane ducasse <[email protected]>wrote: > thanks Paul > :) > we are making progress > > > Rails had 468 committers for its 3.2.0 release [1]. Pharo probably had > > less than a tenth of that between 1.4 and 2.0 and Seaside 3.0 maybe a > > fifth of Pharo. As Stuart mentioned there is work being done. > > Smalltalk is the 48th most popular language on github[2] and so there > > are projects and tooling for interacting with it. On the mailing list > > archive across all Smalltalk public mailing lists there are ~2200 posts > > about github[3] discussing various reasons why things are or are not > > happening. > > > > Its not that there's not effort, or it doesn't exist, or isn't > > considered. Its that its either not there yet, or not going to get > > there because a better option will come up or along that people in the > > more-limited-in-number-of-people-than-you're-used-to open source > > Smalltalk community want to work on more than github integration [4]. > > > > > > > > > > Which features of git are you missing? Which of github? > > > > > > > > > > [1] http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/releases > > [2] https://github.com/languages/Smalltalk > > [3] > > > http://forum.world.st/template/NamlServlet.jtp?macro=search_page&node=1294792&query=github > > [4] http://www.smalltalkhub.com > > > > On 03/19/2013 06:58 PM, Victor Stan wrote: > >> Why are SmallTalk projects/source code hosted on SS3 Gemstone instead of > >> Git/GitHub? > >> > >> I'm coming to SmallTalk from the world of web development with open > >> source software, primarily Rails, and I'm very familiar with the amazing > >> social network/source code repository that is GitHub. It is truly an > >> industry defining entity, so many open source projects have been able to > >> harness the ease of use, features and community around Git and GitHub. > >> > >> At the moment, as I'm trying to learn more about SmallTalk and Pharo > >> especially, (my primary interest in Pharo is to use it as a web > >> development platform), I am a bit shocked, if I may be frank, at the > >> tooling used for source code and open source project management. I see > >> that the popular trend now is to move to SS3/Gemstone, and I appreciate > >> anyone that helps open source development/projects, but I can't see how > >> they can even come close to the functionality of GitHub for source code > >> hosting and OS project management, so I pose the question: is there an > >> effort, why or why not, to start integrating with GitHub and Git for > >> source code management? > >> > >> I know that historical precent and the tools built into Pharo/SmallTalk > >> images, like Monticello are predecessors to GUI source control, but > >> given the leaps that Git has managed to take, in distributed source code > >> management, how does the existing SmallTalk community feel about it's > >> current tooling in this regard? > >> > >> Thanks, > >> > >> Victor Stan > >> > >> Schedule me: > >> http://quicklyschedule.quicklyschedule.me/victor > >> > >> Add me to your address book - it's easy! > >> http://contactmonkey.com/victor > >> > > > > > > >
