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

[David T. Lewis]

Hi Miriam,

I think that your message did not reach the vm-dev mailing list, so I am
CCing the list here. There has been some additional discussion on the list
(list archive is at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2012-May/date.html#start
and you can join the list at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/vm-dev)
that you may want to read, as you probably are not CCed on all of the postings.

I am glad that you are working on the packaging for Debian, and for sure
the VM developers and Scratch developers need to be responsible for solving
problems in VMs and the Scratch image. The discussion now on vm-dev is about
how we can either update the VM or the Scratch image so that two versions
of the VM may not be needed.

Thanks for the work you are doing,
Dave

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 09:49:57AM +0200, Miriam Ruiz wrote:
> 2012/5/10 David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com>:
> 
> > Amos, can you please clarify if further development of the Scratch
> > image is planned? If yes, then updating the Scratch image may be
> > the right thing to do. If no, then we can take a harder look at
> > coming up with a way to produce a backward compatible VM. If neither
> > of these is feasible, then it will probably be necessary to arrange
> > a separate source distribution for a Scratch VM.
> 
> Hi!
> 
> Sorry for the delay in answering to this thread. I think that it is a
> very sensible suggestion you're making. There is one thing I'm
> concerned about, though: if it is finally necessary to include an
> aditional older version of the VM in Debian to be able to run Scratch,
> as other people have suggested earliuer,?who will maintain this VM?
> 
> I mean, I can manage the packaging and some shallow patches if it is
> necessary, as I do with all my packages, but as I'm not especially
> proficient with the VM's code not I ever worked with it at a serious
> level, so there's limits in what I can do. I suppose that Squeak
> developers won't like to have to maintain two versions of the VM, and
> the will probably just keep supporting, evolving and solving bugs from
> the latest. I don't know if Scratch developers are willing or have
> resources to solve big problems in the VM in case they appear, so that
> leaves me probably close to being alone in fixing stuff in the VM if
> something serious appear. I must confess that this perspective kind of
> scares me.
> 
> To sum up, if we finally have to keep a separate version of the VM for
> running Scratch (and BYOB and other derivatives), we have to also find
> out how to handle bugs and improvements in the VM in case that they're
> needed.
> 
> Greetings,
> Miry