[Vm-dev] Alien: separate core, tests and win32 into own packages

[Torsten Bergmann]

Hi Eliot, (CC'ing vm-dev)

hope you had a good start into 2018 and sorry again if the "Alien commit into Alien" [1] created some trouble.

But while we are at discussing about Alien I would like to ask one question: can we split the Alien package into 
two packages instead of just one. One with the core functionality and and have the unit tests separated into an 
own separate package? Also the Win32 struct wrappers should be in an own package as this is platform dependent.

Because with the new possibility to bootstrap smaller images one can build minimal images with just a foreign interface/Alien 
but where SUnit and tests are not loaded.  

Without having the tests in an own separately loadable package such a thing is not possible to realize because loading
Alien would give automatically a dependency to SUnit. Also Alien-Win32 do not make sense if one builds a platform 
specific image for Mac, Unix or the Pi.

So can we split it to be more clean? What do you think about this?

I can spend some time (possibly next week) on separating Alien into two packages and also do/help/check in changing loading configs 
for VMMaker or other. 

For the naming: while in Pharo the packages could already be named
  - "Alien-Core" 
  - "Alien-Core-Test"
  - "Alien-Win32"
as Pharo already supports explicit packages. 

But I'm pretty sure this would be problematic for Squeak 6.0 which still relies on the old category solution. So I would 
suggest to follow Seaside naming convention and name them 
  - "Alien-Core" 
  - "Alien-Tests-Core"
  - "Alien-Win32"
so it is loadable and compatible in all dialects. If you would prefer other names we can align easily.

Thanks for an answer in advance!

Bye
T.

[1] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2018-January/026350.html