[Vm-dev] VM packaging for Cog transition

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Sun Nov 7 21:22:11 UTC 2010


I'm of the mind that Apple takes at the moment. Try the action and then deal with the 
failure case.   I'd just ship with the Cog VM turned on.  If people have problems with it
they can pursue how to turn it off.   Otherwise you'll not get people to migrate. 

On 2010-11-07, at 12:27 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:

> 
> Bert and others have raised the question of how best to package the
> Cog VM and traditional interpreter VM for the next round of VM releases
> in December. Cog is a significant advance, and the Squeak board would
> like this to be fully supported for the Squeak 4.2 release; clearly it
> is a priority for Pharo as well. Meanwhile we have a responsibility for
> Etoys, Scratch, OLPC etc to provide VMs that do not break those systems.
> 
> So - how best to do this?
> 
> For unix VMs, Bert has suggested this:
> 
>> Maybe we need a "squeak-interp" and "squeak-cog" binary, with "squeak"
>> symlinking to either one (using the alternatives system) or "squeak"
>> being a script choosing the right VM based on the image version. But
>> we should present a coherent story to the packagers. As well as to
>> Squeak users.
> 
> Personally I am inclined to think it would be best for this next release
> not to automate the selection of VM, but instead have users make an
> explicit selection. I say this for two reasons:
> 
> 1) From a marketing point of view, it is good if users can directly experience
> the improvement from Cog. So the message might be to first run in the standard
> way (squeak-interp) to get a very cool system that is quite fast, then activate
> turbo mode (squeak-cog) to get a system that is very noticeably 3X faster.
> 
> 2) From a technical and support point of view, there may be various cases
> where it will be necessary to say "sorry, you will need to run squeak-interp
> if you want to do that." When that happens, it would be best if we do not need
> to explain e.g. how to edit a shell script to force it to run squeak-interp.
> 
> The above is just my $.02 to get the discussion started. What do others think?
> 
> Dave
> 

--
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>   Twitter:  squeaker68882
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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