Squeak file locations under Linux/Debian

Maloney johnm at wdi.disney.com
Wed Apr 22 10:13:22 UTC 1998


At 1:28 AM -0500 4/22/98, Ian Bicking wrote:
>I'm trying to set up a Debian/Linux package for Squeak, and I'm not
>sure how to deal with the files.
>
>What I'd *like* to do, is have it set up so that Squeak1.31.image,
>Squeak1.31.changes, and SqueakV1.sources are all in /usr/lib/squeak,
>and when you type "squeak" without any arguments, you run this image.
>Then, to get your own personal copy of the image, you do "save as...".
>The original images are kept safe in their read-only form, and you can
>launch squeak without knowing anything about it -- you can learn about
>Squeak completely from within Squeak.  Plus it doesn't seem cool if a
>package leaves you with more installation to do (i.e., copying
>personal copies of the .image file) -- we have packages to avoid that.
>
>Unfortunately, I don't know how to get this to work.  It's easy enough
>to make Squeak look in /usr/lib/squeak, but Squeak does not like to be
>start up on a read-only changes file.  Even when it isn't read-only,
>the "save as..." doesn't seem to work right -- it doesn't copy the
>.changes file like it should.  Also, the system should only have one
>copy of the SqueakV1.sources, but I'm not how to do that.  It seems
>acceptable to have (more or less) hard-coded file locations, because
>as a binary package it is only supposed to work as a whole (file
>locations and all).
>
>I'd like this to make it easy for someone unfamiliar with Squeak or
>Smalltalk (and thus still unexcited about it) to start this up and get
>to the interesting part quickly, with zero time investment -- in other
>words, "squeak" without any arguments should work.  I'd also like to
>get it to fit nicely into the Unix file conventions.
>
>So... does anyone have any ideas how this should work?

As you say, getting it to launch is pretty easy. The .sources
file can be shared easily; Squeak always looks for this file in the
same folder as the executable, and the file is treated as read-only
by Squeak.

Getting "save as" to allow saving into a different folder than
the original image would require changing the saveAs method, since
it wasn't designed to do anything but change the image file name.

The read-only changes file is the biggest problem, since Squeak is
designed to to log every method change and "do it" that you do. I
suppose it could simply stop trying to log changes if the file
is read-only. Would it be a serious violation of Linux ettiquette
to have a shell script for the "squeak" command that made local
copies of the image and changes files if the user did not supply
an image name argument? If you did this, then nothing about Squeak
would have to be changed.

	-- John





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