Hi,
I want make a little report about progress with making of Fedora pakcages for Smalltalk related projects (StackVM, CogVM, Pharo...) by Jaroslav Å karvada.
Thanks!!!!
Currently there are three packages in Fedora repositories - squeak-vm, squeak-image and squeak-vm-nonXOplugins (that contains plugins like OSProcess). It uses resources from the Squeak site.
Red Hat has quite restrictive demands on packages and it is a small miracle that they tolerate current squeak packages :-). The conditions simply do expect that a program is a set of source codes and not a system of communicating objects. One problem is that Squeak VM is one of few metacircular packages that are needed for their own building. Because binary executables are prohibited, it would require a special bureaucratically problematic exception. Fortunately for virtual machine generation we may use the current squeak packages - more precisely their updated versions. The next issue for virtual machine generation may be the fact, that some packages used for VM generation are in repositories with public read&write permissions.
Because image can be likened to *.jar files that are prohibited and must be recompiled during package generation, we are lucky that squeak-image package is currently accepted. If someone starts tinkering, we are in big trouble.
There is a little issue with *.sources placement. The current VM package contains symlinks from VM path to sources files that are present in package with the image. This is really ugly solution. Squeak and Pharo uses this sequence for sources lookup: vm path, image path, current path. So I think that the best solution will be to have sources file in the image package, do not have symlinks in vm package and to create symlink to sources together with changes in the image path via mysqueak initialization script.
Btw., Jaroslav told me that he saw a lot of creepy projects but nothing like Squeak VM :-)
;)
And there is a mess in VM versioning.
totally
What is the latest CogVM/StackVM version number?
Cheers, -- Pavel