[Vm-dev] Merging FFI and Alien

[Esteban Lorenzano]

Hi,

Recently I’ve been talking with Eliot and we came to the conclusion that FFI and Alien repositories needs to be merged. 
Our rational is that 1) both are different ways of doing the same (often with same primitives) and much more important 2) Alien contains the the “de facto” callback mechanism supported by the VM.
Keeping them separated and treated as two different things is negative and an important source of confusion for people willing to do FFI this days. 
So, here is my proposal (already talked with Eliot).

1) unify http://source.squeak.org/FFI and http://www.squeaksource.com/Alien into http://source.squeak.org/FFI
That means copying into FFI repo all Alien history.

2) Rename Alien package into FFI-Alien (extract the Alien-Win32 category into its own package)

3) Create a ConfigurationOfFFI who takes properly FFI and FFI-Alien, etc.

That means also deprecate Alien project in squeaksource (which usually is just put a WARNING text in home page :P)

So… if nobody has a anything against this plan, I will do it next week :)

cheers!
Esteban