Hi,

considering how important this is, shouldn't this become standard part of the VM?
e.g.

./pharo-x-vm --support pharo-y.image

Which will return
* 1/yes/... if the VM can launch it
* 2/maybe/unclear... if the VM cannot determine it (this is futureproofing, e.g. if you tried to launch Pharo 9 image with Pharo 7 VM)
* 0/no/maxVersion/... returns the latest known VM version that was capable of launching the image (so VM will have a lookup table to check past image versions)

or something along those lines... is there some scenario that wouldn't be covered by these three?

Peter

On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 4:34 PM Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com> wrote:
On Wed, 22 Aug 2018 at 21:33, Christophe Demarey
<christophe.demarey@inria.fr> wrote:
>
> Hi Alistair,
>
> > Le 22 ao��t 2018 �� 12:02, Alistair Grant <akgrant0710@gmail.com> a ��crit :
> >
> > Hi Christophe,
> >
> > On Wed, 22 Aug 2018 at 09:36, Christophe Demarey
> > <christophe.demarey@inria.fr> wrote:
> >>
> >> ...
> >>
> >> As a workaround for now, we are thinking to ship the pharo.version file along with the image to avoid to run images with compatible VMs that we cannot ensure they work well with a given image.
> >
> > Part of the issue here is that Pharo 7 is still�� in development.�� My
> > understanding is that within the development cycle we assume that the
> > latest VM is being used (if I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will correct
> > me :-)).
> >
> > I don't use Pharo Launcher, so I'm not familiar with it, but it seems
> > to me that for the current development version (currently Pharo 7) the
> > launcher needs to ensure that it has the latest stable VM.
>
> You���re right but the problem is that Pharo Launcher has no way to know what is the pharo version of an image before running it and evaluate a small expression.

The VM version auto-evaluation is great, but it would be useful for
another column to explicitly show which VM version to use start an
image, which was also a drop-down list so the VM could be individually
select for each image. Entries could be "Default" (per existing
settings configuration), "Stable", "Latest" plus a list of names of
previously downloaded VMs.�� This would put people in the drivers seat
when the auto-evaluation misses a beat.

cheers -ben