[Vm-dev] Cog VMMaker dependencies

[David T. Lewis]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 02:02:30PM +0100, Igor Stasenko wrote:
> 
> Hello
> 
> i am trying to put everything together and load all VMMaker stuff into
> clean image, and found that it depends on
> ???BochsIA32Alien class, defined in Cog package.
> But this package have no public repository and can be found only in
> vmmaker image which saved by Eliot in SVN repo :(
> 
> Guys, do you mind if i copy this package to VMMaker repository on
> squeaksource, so then we could have an official place where to
> download it.
> Because clearly, we need to make sure that VMMaker could be loaded
> into fresh image from scratch, and in order to do that, we need some
> persistent public place where we can download all packages from.

Funny, I was looking at exactly the same thing yesterday. The Alien
project on SqueakSource provides the NewsqueakIA32ABIPlugin and puts
it in package 'Alien-VMMaker-Plugins'. This is also present in the
oscog image but recategorized to 'VMMaker-Plugins-Alien', which
also contains the new IA32ABIPlugin distributed with Cog. The
BochsIA32Plugin plugin is in 'Cog-ProcessorPlugins'.

The IA32ABIPlugin and BochsIA32Plugin are not yet usable in the
standard VMMaker package (though I hope to correct this after the
current round of VM builds). NewsqueakIA32ABIPlugin builds cleanly
on Linux, though I have no idea if the resulting plugin does anything
useful.

I'm assuming that BochsIA32Plugin is at least loosely related to the
current Alien development in Cog, so my personal preference would be
to store IA32ABIPlugin and BochsIA32Plugin in the SqS/Alien project.
The project seems to be actively maintained, and it already serves
as the source for NewsqueakIA32ABIPlugin (I have it linked to VMMaker
through the configure map). Would that approach be workable?

As an aside, I do think it is a good thing for plugins that are
actively maintained to live in their own projects. Once they land
in VMMaker, they tend to become homeless children ;)

Dave