On Jun 18, 2014, at 5:49 AM, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 18 June 2014 00:19, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 07:00:30PM -0400, Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:
>>> On 2014-06-17 6:56 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:
>>>> Generating VM builds for general distribution on build.squeak.org is a Really
>>>> Bad Idea. Please do not do that.
>>> 
>>> Can you expand on this, please? Why is it such a Very Bad Idea?
>> 
>> The authors and maintainers of the VMs for various platforms put a lot
>> of time and effort into producing reliable products, and in trying to do
>> so in such a way that they have some reasonable chance of answering questions
>> when things do not work. Setting up a random bunch of undocumented and unsupported
>> variations on those VMs makes life difficult for the people who are creating
>> and supporting them, and especially so if those undocumented distributions
>> are being served from a site that has "squeak.org" in its name.
> 
> Using CI is exactly the opposite of "random", particularly if the
> scripts that generate these artifacts are themselves blessed by said
> VM maintainers.
> 
> Also, build.squeak.org doesn't produce artifacts for "general
> distribution". I think anyone downloading an artifact from a CI server
> and then complaining that the thing's not reliable gets exactly what's
> coming to them: either they're prepared to test an alpha quality
> thing, or we should tell them where to download the officially
> supported versions.
> 
> What I don't want is for VM maintainers to have to waste their time
> building things that a computer can do for them. Ideally, for
> instance, I'd like to see a test that takes a brand new Cog VM, buids
> a deb, installs that deb on a clean machine, and fires up an
> officially sanctioned Squeak image (and Pharo, and Cuis, and NewSpeak
> images for that matter). That way we can know that the deb actually
> works.

+1.  But who pays for the I frastructure, both "physical" and setting it up?  I like the idea that someone else in the community created a functional Debian install artifact.  The issue now is how to test and (if ok) deploy it at minimal cost to us all :-)

>> It's great to experiment, but let's have some consideration for the authors
>> and maintainers of the VMs, and let's be careful that the things that we
>> present to the world on squeak.org have real credibility and the best possible
>> support.
> 
> I'm not sure how creating a deb automatically means disrespecting VM
> maintainers. Why is credibility an issue? "Hey something broken in
> this alpha version of a VM" says Random Newbie "Well if you can't
> handle gdb, don't do that." says VM Maintainer. Producing these easily
> consumed artifacts ought to help get more VM testers testing things,
> instead of asking them to download source and learn the necessary
> incantations.
> 
> I do deeply appreciate that VM maintainers jump through a great many
> hoops in their work: Iam Piumarta keeps a whole pile of machines
> running arcane OSes so he can test the Interpreter VM, for instance.
> 
> I just don't see why automating tedious tasks causes big problems.
> 
> frank
> 
>> Dave
>