[Vm-dev] Help/advice tracking down a squeak-vm regression

[Alex Bradbury]

David and Igor: thanks for your responses. Comments below.

On 7 May 2012 00:28, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> If I remember correctly, Scratch derives from a Squeak 3.6 image and uses
> a VM of similar vintage. Since the days of Squeak 3.6, there have been
> a number of fundamental changes in the Squeak VM. I recall some discussion
> of this perhaps a couple of years ago, and I think that the prevailing
> view was that it made more sense to bring the Scratch image up to date
> with respect to the VM changes, as opposed to trying to make a single
> VM that could be backward compatible all the way to Squeak 3.6.

Though the current squeak image did work flawlessly in squeak-vm 4.0?
So the upstream view is that this is not officially supported and the
correct solution if it no longer works on 4.4 is to just use an older
vm?

> From a license point of view, is there any reason that the Scratch VM
> and source code could not be distributed on Debian? If this is acceptable,
> then I expect that the fastest way to achieve a working distribution would
> involve arranging for Scratch to run using a VM at e.g. /usr/bin/scratch,
> and Squeak to run with /usr/bin/squeak or /usr/bin/cog.

It does seem that the Ubuntu packages bundles its own
scratch_squeak_vm. Either that, or supporting the installation of
squeak-vm 4.0 alongside 4.4 might be good options. For my purposes
with the Raspberry Pi, I'm probably just going to install and pin the
squeeze squeak-vm (4.0) until a better solution comes along.

Alex