On 19/10/11 15:56, Chris Cunnington wrote:
>  As I understand it, we don't have the same kind of present and
>  immediate control over distribution of the vm and the image, as we do
>  with Mac and PC. I think with Linux it's more likely you'll download
>  the image and vm separately, from different sources. Say you get your
>  vm from apt-get, rpm, or yum. And then we release a new image. Maybe
>  people will just see everything fail. The Cog vm is a big jump. You
>  use it, and you can't readily go back to the interpreter. Jecel is
>  going to look at what vms Linux users are using. Are they still 3.x
>  vms? That sort of thing. The mechanism for Linux users to get what we
>  make is a little different. But since you clearly are in the loop, I
>  don't think any of this kind of delay would apply to you. I'd say its
>  more a communications thing than a technical challenge.
>
>  Chris
>

Thanks for the explanation. I don't have a complete overview on all 
distro's but the main packaging formats can surely handle dependencies 
so that end-users don't end up with a mismatched vm/image. If more 
safety is needed then why not have cog/start-up-script do a one-time 
back-up of the image automatically? I'm guessing package maintainers 
would be more than happy to quickly get to the point of sourcing one vm 
for Squeak/Etoys/Scratch, etc.

-D