Software Evolution from the Field: An Experience Report from the Squeak Maintainers

Over the last few years, we actively participated in the maintenance and evolution of Squeak, an open-source Smalltalk. The community is constantly faced with the problem of enabling changes while at the same time preserving compatibility. In this paper we describe the current situation, the problems that faced the community and we outline the improvements that have been introduced. We also identify some areas where problems continue to exist and propose these as potential problems to addressed by the research community.