It is possible that I have misunderstood the whole situation and there is no problem at all. That would be awesome. Let's check :-) here is my understanding of the state of the world right now:

The latest stable image release is Pharo-50771.image.

The latest stable VM source release is pharo-vm-2016.02.18.

These two releases are not compatible: This interpreter (vers. 6505) cannot read image file (vers. 6521).

So the problem is that if a distribution packages the latest VM source release then the users won't be able to run the Pharo 5 VM that they download from pharo.org or via the pharo-launcher image.

Is that correct? If so that's fine and hopefully we can fix it for Pharo 6.0. But if I am misunderstanding and a fix is available today that would also be good to know.

I am looking for the "latest VM source release" in��http://files.pharo.org/vm/src/vm-unix-sources/ and assuming that non-spur is the stable option for pre-6.0 images.

Cheers!

-Luke