Not just laziness, but also convenience. The people who trying it first time, obviously having lack of knowledge, where all those plugins resided, in what repositories, and most important - do he needs them to build a test VM.
So, i think there are missing some kind of registry in VMMaker, which could tell a user , what plugins existing and where he can download them, what plugins is critical for running an image, and what is optional and can be ignored.
It would be cool to have a 1-click VM builder. So, anyone could download, install & build VM, without requiring user attention.
2009/11/17 Andreas Raab andreas.raab@gmx.de:
David T. Lewis wrote:
- FFI-SharedPools
- FFI-Kernel
- FFI-Tests
- FFI-Examples
Good, if you can make this change and make it available on a repository, then I'll update the MCConfiguration for VMMaker to pull in the FFI-SharedPools. Bert suggested the same naming convention for Speech-SharedPools, so I can update the Speech packaging if that is the preference.
Done. I've actually named the package FFI-Pools (shorter and to the point); I don't think that naming matters as long as you can figure out what it likely contains.
The structure makes a lot of sense and I could even imaging moving the plugin here (i.e., into FFI-Plugin).
I have a slight bias, motivated primarily by personal laziness, toward the original Squeak categories that would lead to e.g.
VMConstruction-Interpreter/ObjectMemory VMConstruction-Plugins/FFIPlugin VMConstruction-Plugins-OSProcessPlugin/OSProcessPlugin
But either convention would be fine. Long term I think that VMMaker should be repackaged into smaller pieces, and I have a hard time improving on the category names that were used back in Squeak 2.4.
I have no particular preference either way. The laziness is traded in my view by making sure you actually know how to find the prerequisites, i.e., you won't be able to load VMMaker if you don't know where to find the FFI pools but that should be fair game if you don't care about the FFI. Or more to the point Speech. I'm sure there are people out there who don't care about the Klatt plugin and forcing them to go onto a hunt for this or that prerequisite seems pointless unless they care. But then, given that I just went through the process of installing all the bits I can see your point about laziness :)
Cheers, - Andreas