Hello gettimothy,
If you want to integrate the Pharo build, here is the script I use to build the VM (I use this script since I built first the Pharo VM in 2012)
cd pharo-vm
./pharo generator.image eval 'PharoVMBuilder buildMacOSX32'
cd ../build
bash build.sh
Then the VM is in results folder.
newImage.sh creates a generator.image (Now we have that for the Cog branch as Eliot added it when I was visiting him in May).
build.sh consists basically in calling cmake then make:
if [ ! -e vmVersionInfo.h ]; then
../codegen-scripts/extract-commit-info.sh
Now your process is not as easy at it looks like. I know you are aware but compiling the VM requires people to install different softwares (typically git, cmake, wget, Xcode command line tools for me on Mac) and for the Pharo build, it requires CLang which is fine but I am not able to build from Eliot sources which requires gcc.
So I think your app should in addition check depending on the platform (windows, Linux, Mac OS X, RISC OS) if everything required to compile the VM is installed, and else install it automatically.
The best would be to try to compile the VM on a freshly installed computer so you can know if it installs everything that is needed.
Keep going with this great work :-)
Regards,
Clément