How About an InstallSqueak Image?
Andrew C. Greenberg
werdna at gate.net
Tue Jun 15 02:22:02 UTC 1999
All this talk about using third party installation programs to setup
Squeak got me real depressed. However, particularly with the few
examples we have seen, got me thinking. The hard problem is finding
a good machine-independent installation program. (There is an
installshield for Java that's not bad, but hey . . .)
Hey, guys, don't we know a REALLY, REALLY good machine-independent system?
Why not use a tiny Squeak to bootstrap a bigger Squeak?
Here's my observation: (1) the Squeak source files (both original and
changes), and my image itself compress under gzip really, really,
well. (16M -> about 6M) (2) Squeak has a very nice little
gzipstream decompression routine already built in. (A simple test
shows it works quite nicely).
So, why not make an absolutely ultra-minimum image that is capable,
say, of supporting a window, progress bar and the stream. Save the
gzip versions of the target files in ByteArrays. Teach
installSqueak to quietly ignore its inability to load sources
(trivial change to openSources), and upon startUp, to automatically
decompress, perhaps while displaying a nice logotype and some pretty
progress bars: (1) an image; (2) the image's change file; and (3) the
original sources. (Or whatever else we programmed the installSqueak
image to deliver).
Then, all we need to make a new squeak distribution is a native VM
and a machine-independent installSqueak image? (Heck, you might even
have a machine-dependent installSqueak image to package native
plugins).
What is more, if we do this with even a mild amount of common sense,
it should be UTTERLY TRIVIAL to repackage a new image/sources
combination into an InstallSqueak image.
We only need to do this once, maybe twice before we don't have to
worry about it any more? Once we have the basics, we can even build
InstallSqueak into a super-cool general purpose and
machine-independent installshield for general purpose stuff. Anyone
game to get this started? [I have depositions booked solid for the
next two weeks or I'd do this myself.]
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