<div dir="ltr">Hi David, Hi All,<br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 4:19 PM, David T. Lewis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:lewis@mail.msen.com" target="_blank">lewis@mail.msen.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5">On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 07:00:30PM -0400, Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:<br>
> On 2014-06-17 6:56 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:<br>
> > Generating VM builds for general distribution on <a href="http://build.squeak.org" target="_blank">build.squeak.org</a> is a Really<br>
> > Bad Idea. Please do not do that.<br>
><br>
> Can you expand on this, please? Why is it such a Very Bad Idea?<br>
><br>
<br>
</div></div>The authors and maintainers of the VMs for various platforms put a lot<br>
of time and effort into producing reliable products, and in trying to do<br>
so in such a way that they have some reasonable chance of answering questions<br>
when things do not work. Setting up a random bunch of undocumented and unsupported<br>
variations on those VMs makes life difficult for the people who are creating<br>
and supporting them, and especially so if those undocumented distributions<br>
are being served from a site that has "<a href="http://squeak.org" target="_blank">squeak.org</a>" in its name.<br>
<br>
It's great to experiment, but let's have some consideration for the authors<br>
and maintainers of the VMs, and let's be careful that the things that we<br>
present to the world on <a href="http://squeak.org" target="_blank">squeak.org</a> have real credibility and the best possible<br>
support.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I'm not so concerned in this case because it looks like it is just a repackaging of a prebuilt VM. What would be nice is if this approach is documented and replicated for other distros. Then we have something we can allow distro maintainers to take wen they want to build an install artifact for a particular distro (if that doesn't sound hopelessly circular).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Of course there are still issues, glibc version being one of them, whether to use the threaded heartbeat or the itimer one, etc. But I have no objection to folks taking the tarball and munging it to produce something that installs nicely. In fact I think its a good thing, as Chris' original complaint pointed to.</div>
<div></div></div><div><br></div><div>Personally I would approach support with a "this is unsupported but the following people have had success on the following platforms" approach. That's honest. I only provide support for VMs to Cadence customers. I try and provide working VMs but I'm in no position to provide support.</div>
-- <br>best,<div>Eliot</div>
</div></div>