Thanks for the fast response! Can you also recommend the best pharo-launcher image version to package? The stable one looks stale (lists Pharo 5.0 as "beta" for me) On Tue, 4 Apr 2017 at 08:45, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com> wrote:

in fact, I will promote a new stable soon, so I’d recommend for now take the master branch of https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm

Esteban

On 4 Apr 2017, at 07:01, Luke Gorrie <luke@snabb.co> wrote:

Questions!

Where can I find the source code for the latest stable Linux/unix VM for Pharo 5.0? I want to package it for a Linux distribution (NixOS).

Currently I am confused:

The release tarballs at http://files.pharo.org/vm/src/vm-unix-sources/blessed show the latest non-Spur version being 2016-02-18.

The github repo at https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm has a tag Pharo50-stable on commit b8ec25a which dates from 2016-05-04. (Is this tag immutable or does it move around?)

The URL for downloading binaries (get.pharo.org/vm50) does not seem to say anywhere what version it is downloading, and it was not obvious to me from downloading the binary and inspecting it with 'strings' either (it's not for my distro so I can't just run it with '--version').

Help would be appreciated!

Great if somebody could also tell me under what circumstances the spur VM is preferred to the non-spur VM.

On 4 Apr 2017, at 10:55, Luke Gorrie <luke@snabb.co> wrote:

Hi again Esteban,

On 4 April 2017 at 08:44, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com <mailto:estebanlm@gmail.com>> wrote: in fact, I will promote a new stable soon, so I’d recommend for now take the master branch of https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm <https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm>

Could you possibly spin a (alpha) release that I could use?

well, I’m working on commit also generated sources as an amend… but you will need to wait a couple of days for that :) Esteban

The problem with building directly from Git is that then I need to use another Pharo for bootstrapping and this will complicate the build process considerably. I can't use the get.pharo.org <http://get.pharo.org/> method on NixOS both because the binary won't be compatible and because I need all dependencies to be locked down with a known sha256. So I would need to build the previous VM release from source and combine that with a compatible (pre-5.0) image to run VMMaker. This sounds a bit complicated, time consuming, and prone to error if I am using a much older image than the official releases for bootstrapping.

Cheers! -Luke

On 4 April 2017 at 12:16, Luke Gorrie <luke@snabb.co> wrote:

On 4 April 2017 at 12:01, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com> wrote:

...

well, I’m working on commit also generated sources as an amend… but you will need to wait a couple of days for that :)

Sounds great, thanks in advance!

Gentle ping on a Pharo VM unix source release that works with the 5.0 image :-)

On 12 April 2017 at 10:27, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com> wrote:

yes, at the end I did a different process. after cloning vm sources, now you do not need to generate them… just go to

$ cd build.linuxWHATEVER/pharo.cog.spur/build $ ./mvm

that will work and produce the official latest VM :)

Thanks for the information. I will give it a try. Any chance of updating the instructions in the README for future reference?

On 12 April 2017 at 14:08, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com> wrote:

It is in my TODO list. … along with other milliards of things with more priority ;)

I will welcome any Pull Request, in any area but specially on that one :D

I can potentially make some time to help out with VM maintenance. I have already volunteered to maintain the NixOS packaging for Pharo and that is what leads me here in the first place, I will need to successfully build the VM myself before I can help anybody else though :). Before committing time I would like to understand the situation a little bit better. How come nobody in the Pharo community sees it as a priority to make a VM source release that is compatible with the current image version (5.0)? I had imagined that a compatible VM would be released at the same time as the image. So I am obviously missing some point about why other people see the VM source release as such a low priority. Is it just that everybody is running zeroconf binaries distributed by Jenkins and that I am one of very few people who wants to build from source (without bootstrapping from another Pharo)? Context: I am a relative newbie who wants to develop an application based on Pharo. It's much harder than I expected to get started!