Squeak at MIT -- Project Notebook

Project Plan

Opportunity Evaluation

Squeak represents a new level of portability and wider deployability of Smalltalk. Smalltalk represents an attractive approach to development and deployment of applications. There is value in making squeak available to the wider MIT community so that interested people could become familiar with it, and perhaps develop useful applications, taking advantage of Squeak's ubituity, and Smalltalk's ease of use.

Scope Statement

1. Enable a broader audience to experiment with Squeak and conveniently use it.
2. Explore novel applications employing features unique to Squeak.
3. Feed what is learned at MIT back to the Squeak core team. This includes experience, bugs identified, bug fixes formulated, and enhancements developed here.

A secondary objective would be to deploy to end-users novel applications developed under squeak. This objective is secondary to the mission of making a convenient Squeak developer deployment happen. Once that developer deployment is done, priority can be given to the objective of deploying end-user Squeak applications.

Deliverables

1. Mailing lists for developers and users along with archives
2. A consistent Squeak execution environment for use on Athena consisting of:
   • Squeak 2.3 source, image, and changes files installed in a locker.
   • VM's for Sun and SGI
   • A convenient wrapper script that will give each user their own copy of the required read/write files such as Squeak2.3.image
3. A consistent source and build tree so that developers can build the VM

• squeak-dev mailing list and discuss meeting for developers
• squeak-users mailing list and discuss meeting for users
• /mit/squeak is the squeak locker containing the build and execution stuff including the wrapper script.

Work Breakdown

• DONE Obtain Squeak 2.3 image, changes file, source file, and VM sources.
• DONE Deploy Solaris VM.
• Determine conventions for making Linux VM available.
• Deploy Linux VM
• DONE Build for Solaris to confirm VM source build works.
• DONE Build for SGI IRIX 6.3.
• DONE Build for SGI IRIX 6.2. (Try and do the 6.3 build so it works for both.)
• DONE Investigate teaching X support to ask for visual with more bits per pixel than the DefaultVisual.
• DONE Get X code reviewed, and try and get it into the core source tree.
• DONE Write wrapper to run squeak conveniently
• See if there is a SQUEAKHOME or /tmp/squeak- if none.
• Warn if image is newer, ask if refresh desired.
• Copy image and changes to SQUEAKHOME if desired, missing, or command line says to.
• Start squeak (with memory -16m) -- in latest VM source REBUILD to roll out.
• Announce squeak locker (when wrapper is working).
• DONE Create squeak-users list.
• DONE Create squeak-dev list.