On 19.10.2011, at 17:16, Derek O'Connell wrote:

> 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


What we want (or what I think we should aim for) is that a user installs the squeak-vm package from their distro, and that's all to make double-clicking any image work. The same should be true if you type "squeak some.image" on the command line, too.

That requires "squeak" to be a shell script (which it already is, also used in the .desktop files) which decides which VM to run based on the image version (this part has not been implemented yet). The VM package would contain two VMs. One interpreter, plus a Cog (on intel) or Stack VM (other than intel). They might even share the plugins.

The current situation is that e.g. Fedora only has 3.10 VMs which can't even open a closure image:

	https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/applications/Mysqueak

Debian has more recent 4.x VMs:

	http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=sourcenames&keywords=squeak-vm

But only the unstable Debian one can open a Cog image, so we think we should not release 4.3 as Cog image, yet.

- Bert -