On 2/14/07, <b class="gmail_sendername"><a href="mailto:bryce@kampjes.demon.co.uk">bryce@kampjes.demon.co.uk</a></b> <<a href="mailto:bryce@kampjes.demon.co.uk">bryce@kampjes.demon.co.uk</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote">
</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>I've had a look at Andrew's VM building script. It would be nice to<br>automate the set-up of a VM building environment. Though, I'd rather
<br>have it scripted from Smalltalk than from shell. Would it be<br>worthwhile adding the shell script to a class side method as<br>executable documentation?</blockquote><div><br>Hi Bryce,<br><br>By all means feel free to use my script as documentation.
<br>However, be warned that it doesn't work yet! What I sent was<br>a first pass, to see if there was interest from the rest of the<br>Exupery community, and to get some feedback (thanks, BTW).<br><br>(I've been ill for a while now, so there hasn't been much
<br>progress on the script, but I am planning to get back to it.)<br><br>I'm keen to have a way building an Exupery image starting<br>only with the basic bits: the VM source, a vanilla (released)<br>image, etc. The reason for this is that I'm keen to try porting
<br>Exupery to other CPUs, and this seemed like a good starting<br>point. Also, I feel that being able to recreate the whole<br>Exupery environment (VM + image) would lower the barrier<br>to entry for others who might be interested in working on the
<br>compiler.<br><br>As a rule, I try to build images from scratch where possible,<br>to know exactly what went into them, in what order; using a<br>program to build them automates the whole process nicely.<br><br>I feel that making Exupery able to target many CPUs might
<br>shake out some latent bugs (alignment, endianness,<br>word-size, ABI, and so on). And I have various machines<br>for testing: x86, SPARC, HPPA, Alpha, and ARM, giving a<br>good mix of LE/BE and 32-/64-bit.<br></div><br>
Anyway, by all means replace the shell script with Smalltalk<br>if you feel that's the way to go. Initially, I felt that shell was<br>a better starting point (configure, make, make install, etc),<br>but as I looked more & more at all the bits I needed to add
<br>to the image, I started to realise that the Smalltalk section<br>inside the script would probably exceed the shell bits by a<br>good percentage, making Smalltalk a better choice for the<br>job.<br><br>Andrew.<br></div>