^^^ please forgive gratuitously combative tone :)

Fighting the VM build in another window. Just now I am able to build the 32-bit VM from master and run both the Pharo 5 and Pharo 6 images. The next problem is the issue of accessing $HOME. The actual error is ExternalLibraryFunction>>invokeWithArguments: failing to call getenv() from libc. Simplest way that I can reproduce it here is Smalltalk os environment at: 'HOME'.

Checking for what I can have mucked up in the build...

Otherwise I need to supply the "smudged" version information in some reasonable way. I don't have access to the .git folder during build so I can't use the perl script directly. I see that I can't just skip these values either because on startup I am also seeing a warning that my "VM is too old" coming from DiskStore class>>checkVMVersion that wants to see that my VM source is from at least July 2012 :).