[squeak-dev] Packaging of 4.1?

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Tue Mar 23 12:56:36 UTC 2010


On 19.03.2010, at 21:35, Michael van der Gulik wrote:
> 
> Hi all.
> 
> How should the next version of Squeak be packaged?
> 
> I currently use Linux, mostly from the command line. To install
> Squeak, I need to go through a fairly involved (but for me, mostly
> automatic) process:
> 1. Make a new directory.
> 2. Download the zip file containing image and changes files.
> 3. Unzip and RENAME them to squeak.image, squeak.changes, in the new directory.
> 4. Find the relevant sources file (now there are several of them!) and
> copy / symlink it to that dir.
> 5. Find the right VM I want (I have several, some self-compiled) and
> copy / symlink to that dir with the plugins I want.
> 
> I would not expect new users to do all this.
> 
> How do you install and run Squeak?
> 
> How can we make it easier for new users?
> 
> I believe that most people use a standard desktop environment these
> days: Mac, Windows, Gnome, KDE or LXDE. The common features I see that
> would be useful are:
> * File associations / MIME types that start applications.
> * In a file browser, a "Create new" menu that uses templates.
> 
> What would be nice is that a Squeak installer creates a file
> association for an image file so that the users can just double-click
> it, and that the file browser's "Create new" menu contains an option
> to make a new Squeak image.
> 
> Web browsers often complain on start-up if they aren't properly
> associated with HTML files. Can we do this in Squeak?
> 
> Is the ".image" extension the best one to use? Is another file
> extension, such as ".cryodessication" perhaps better?
> 
> Gulik.
> 
> -- 
> http://gulik.pbwiki.com/

I intentionally waited a couple of days before responding. As usual, this topic has little interest :(

IMHO when working on packaging for Linux in particular, we need to do that together with the distro maintainers. Wouldn't it be nice if all you needed to do to get the latest Squeak would be "apt-get install squeak" or "yum install squeak"? In fact this works for Etoys already. Not perfectly, but we're getting there. And with the license-clean 4.0 it would be possible to package Squeak itself now too.

The topic comes up from time to time. See for example my message here:
https://lists.launchpad.net/scratch/msg00087.html

Also, I try to keep track of the etoys and squeak-vm packages in various distros:
http://wiki.squeakland.org/display/sq/Bug+Tracking

- Bert -





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