[squeak-dev] Linux VM packages (was: Squeak Oversight Board minutes ? 10/18/11)

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Thu Oct 20 16:30:37 UTC 2011


On 20.10.2011, at 15:41, David T. Lewis wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 10:55:46AM -0300, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
>> David T. Lewis wrote:
>>> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 04:49:33PM -0300, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
>>>> [my old Linux system]
>>> 
>>> To check my understanding, you are using the 4.0.3-2202 because you
>>> are stuck on an older Linux version, and the newer VMs do not run on
>>> that older platform due to runtime library differences on the older
>>> Linux system that you use versus the newer Linux system on which the
>>> VM was compiled. Is that right?
>> 
>> I have not yet tested newer VMs, but there is a good chance that they
>> will work even on Fedora 10. What I was trying to say is that there are
>> many different situations out there and we should not attempt to support
>> most of them, like mine. About people being "smart enough", we have to
>> pick some situations where they aren't and make it "just work" for them
>> and, unfortunately, let the rest take care of themselves.
> 
> Thanks, I understand and fully agree!
> 
>> In another email you suggested a role of an official Squeak ambassador
>> for dealing with the various package mantainers in the Linux
>> distributions, right? I think that is a good idea - most such mantainers
>> take care of many packages other than Squeak and don't have time to pay
>> too much attention to what we do nor do they know very much about it. If
>> someone had the emails of all these people and could keep them updated
>> and answer their questions it would help a lot.
> 
> I do not know much about the people actually doing the work of package
> maintenance (and I would say that Bert has the most expertise and experience
> here), but I would think that maintaining a VM package for any given
> Linux distribution would be a big enough job for one person. It requires
> a lot of knowledge, as well as a willingness to look after the issues over
> a period of years. I think that Bert has acted as our unofficial ambassador
> for a long time, but keeping track of the various distros is far more
> than one person could ever do, and somebody has to do the real work of
> package maintenance for each of the distros.
> 
> Dave

It's hard to get all the distro maintainers onto one table. They tend to work independently and don't care much how some software is packaged elsewhere.

There is even a packaging mailing list I pointed out to various maintainers, but (maybe because it's hosted by Debian) it didn't get much use. Lately it only had spam:

	http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-squeak/

Really the only way I see is making it as simple as possible for others to package Squeak. That means regular tarball releases in an obvious place, plus maybe a readme addressed at packagers.

- Bert -





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list