[Vm-dev] Broken links on http://squeakvm.org/mac/ & Latest official Squeak Mac VM

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Tue Aug 20 19:49:56 UTC 2013


On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 04:28:49PM +0200, Esteban Lorenzano wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> sorry for the delayed answer.
> 
> the problem is that pharo changed his servers and I forget to update the links :(
> ... and I tried to fix it but I failed to connect to the server :_(
> 
> Anyway this is a good excuse to have a discussion about the VMs, its flavors and maintainability. 
> 
> is obvious that since I came to work at pharo team, I concentrated more efforts in making the pharo flavor work... but in any case I've ensured that all the changes I made to the VM are also accessible to everybody that is willing to take it (I worked specially in the building process and in the plugins, the main code is still "vanilla-cog" :)
> That's why the CMakeMaker building process has also configurations for Cog, CogMT and StackVM, all correctly maintained. 
> Extend it to make others (Squeak, Cuis, etc.) is a work of some minutes if desired. 
> 
> In other side, the Squeak community has choose to bless the builds from Eliot as their cannon and in general did not took my work (prove of that is that those links are broken since months and nobody realized until now).
> (I'm not complaining, I'm perfectly ok with that... I'm just pointing it). 
> 
> I think the overall "maintainer" job has changed last years:
> 
> - currently we have a "general maintainer" (Eliot) who builds for the three platforms. 
> - we also have continuous integration processes who does an important part of the previous boring work (pharo has one and squeak too AFAIK but I couldn't find the link). 
> 
> In that scenario, there is no much work to do thankfully :)
> 
> Anyway, I would like to propose to whoever has the access to the squeakvm.org to add directly links to:
> 
> - http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/VM
> eliot could add a "current" link.
> - http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo
> - http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharoS
> - and link to the place where squeak stores his built VMs. 
> 
> that will easy everything, I think. 
> 
> cheers, 
> Esteban
> 
> 
> On Aug 11, 2013, at 3:51 AM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 08:35:25PM +0200, Bernhard Pieber wrote:
> >> 
> >> Dear VM maintainers,
> >> 
> >> It seems that the links to the latest builds of the Mac VM for Squeak on
> >> http://squeakvm.org/mac/ are broken. I wonder where I can get the latest
> >> official release of the Squeak Mac VM? The latest release in
> >> http://squeakvm.org/mac/release/ is 5.7.4.1 from March 2011.
> >> 
> > 
> > Esteban Lorenzano is the official maintainer of the Mac VM. Esteban, can
> > you provide status on this?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Dave
> > 

Hi Esteban,

Is this what we want? The Mac Squeak page at http://squeakvm.org/mac/ says
"You have reached the primary site for distributions of Mac Squeak", and
its latest builds section now points to these:

  https://ci.lille.inria.fr/pharo/job/Cog-VM/Architecture=32,OS=mac/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/Cog-mac.zip

  https://ci.lille.inria.fr/pharo/job/Cog-VM/Architecture=32,OS=mac/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/Cog-mac.zip

These are "Pharo branded" versions of a fork of Eliot's Cog VM, which is in
turn based on a fork of the trunk version of the Squeak VM. I do not know
how well or poorly those VMs work with Squeak, but I have to ask whether
it is appropriate to represent them as the latest builds of VMs for Squeak.

If they are appropriate for Squeak (as well as Pharo), then we need some sort
of process for incorporating the improvements from Pharo and other VM projects
into the upstream trunk, either Pharo -> Cog -> trunk, or directly to trunk
and Cog, whatever works. Traditionally the platform maintainers have worried
about this, but the important thing is that somebody has to actually *do* it.

As a reality check: The trunk platform sources http://squeakvm.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/squeak/trunk/platforms/
for Mac OS and iOS have not been touched since John McIntosh last updated
them over two years ago, and we no longer have Andreas available to support
his Windows VM. This means that we are effectively missing primary platform
maintainers for Mac and Windows for the VM platform trunk.

Dave



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