A squeak3.4 VM will be needed

Stephane Ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sun Jan 19 15:04:02 UTC 2003


I would really be sure that what you are mentioning is working. Do we 
have installers
for mac and windows that install squeak correctly as you mention? This 
would help me a lot to present how to start squeak.

Stef



On Sunday, January 19, 2003, at 03:53 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Stephane,
>
> A general comment:
>> So I thought that having a consistent naming would be good for them.
>
> Dead wrong (or rather: entirely besides the point). The teachers (I 
> should
> say: all but hardcore Smalltalk people) do neither care about VM nor 
> image.
> They care about the APPLICATION and they don't give a [beep] about 
> whether
> it is composed of a bunch of files or not (do you care that any of your
> preferred apps require a few files? no, all that matters is that the 
> APP
> runs)
>
> So having an installer which puts a shortcut on the desktop or into the
> start menu would be good for them. Which - not quite incidentally - is 
> what
> the plugin installer does.
>
> Then, there is no need to worry about either VM or image: There is only
> Squeak. Period. And the shortcut is actually what is handling the 
> complexity
> for us - since it can refer to a specific VM+image pair so that there 
> can be
> arbitrary versions of Squeak living side by side without having to 
> worry
> about any of the "implicit complexities" of finding images, or VMs or
> whatever else.
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
>> [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On
>> Behalf Of Stephane Ducasse
>> Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2003 3:38 PM
>> To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
>> Subject: Re: A squeak3.4 VM will be needed
>>
>>
>> Hi andreas
>>
>> You have certainly more thought about it that I. In fact, I
>> do not care
>> if the vm is named Squeak.exe or Squeak3.4.exe but not Squeak3.2.b8.
>>
>> Also what I see with my wife and her school is that she have to ask a
>> guy not knowing too much about computers to install Squeak. I
>> tried to
>> convince him to just use a bundle with everything inside for all the
>> machines there. This was not without energy because
>> people like network and shared stuff putting the vm in one place and
>> images in another one....
>>
>> So to conclude, for me the solution is that teachers and
>> other that do
>> not have the time
>> to really get into it do not have Squeak3.2 VM getting executed when
>> clicking on a 3.4 image if this breaks.
>>
>> So I thought that having a consistent naming would be good for them.
>>
>>> Nitpick: Most people new to Squeak who do not know about the
>>> significance of
>>> the "image" will double click the executable and NOT the image.
>>> Therefore it
>>> is mostly not the image that "looks for a file name" but
>> rather the VM
>>> (and
>>> I went to some length to make this work in a way that the VM will -
>>> unless
>>> it is ambigious - find the "right" image).
>>>
>>> Secondly, even many people who do know about "images"
>> probably do not
>>> have a
>>> persistent association between "image" files and the executable in
>>> which
>>> case they are likely to use DnD for starting Squeak.
>>
>> I think that starting with Drag and Drop is a really secure way. One
>> experienced teacher told me that....I never thought about that before.
>>
>>> Only if they have an association between .image and a Squeak VM the
>>> system
>>> will go digging for it. And here, the file name of the VM
>> matters only
>>> insofar as that there are no real choices - the registry only says
>>> "start
>>> C:\Foo\Bar\Squeak.exe when the user double clicks on an image". (so
>>> there
>>> are no choices for *all* of the images).
>>>
>>> The latter is partly why I like naming the VM just "Squeak.exe" for
>>> all but
>>> the most experienced Squeakers. It encourages them to think
>> about the
>>> VM as
>>> "essentially the same" across all versions (which is true -
>> you can run
>>> everything back to Squeak 1.1 on the latest VMs) and (for
>> the largest
>>> part)
>>> not to worry about "uh... now this is Squeak 3.4 VM ...
>> will this work
>>> if I
>>> try to start Squeak3.2.image with it???"
>>
>> I can agree this is much better than Squeak3.2b5... (I'm not talking
>> about not public release here). Every times john makes a new
>> version I
>> like with the numbering so I can identify which one I'm working with
>> (thanks for your job John;)).
>>
>> stef
>>
>>
>
>
>
Dr. Stéphane DUCASSE (ducasse at iam.unibe.ch) 
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
  "if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do
  different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today
  might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes




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