Squeak mutlitple versions..."official/blessed" release questions...

Serg Koren Serg at VisualNewt.com
Sun Jan 18 18:04:33 UTC 1998


I guess this leads me to ask...  Since there seem to be many people making modifications to various images of Squeak; and some of these changes may affect portability, etc.  is there a mechanism in place to consolidate these changes from image to image?  It sounds from my short time on this group that a lot of neat stuff is being done by various people, but that these are pretty independant efforts.  And if someone releases an image (such as I did for the Mac)  how does it become "official" or "blessed"? 


I guess this is one reason I released my Mac version as 1.24SK  (appending my initials) both to tell people it's not really an "official/blessed" version--if there is such a thing, and to avoid a versioning conflict with anyone else creating/working on a 1.24 version. 


If it helps and there's enough interest I'd be willing to keep and maintain a central site of 'fileOut's by OS type as well as links to people who have Squeak code to distribute. This could be used by people to pick/choose options they may want to load into their images that doesn't fall within an "official" release.  There are a lot of sites out there that have good stuff but there doesn't seem to be a "central" site that links to them or organizes what is out there.


Personally, I think the cross-platform portability of the code and base interepreter VMs is a key benefit of Squeak over other languages, and I'd be upset to see anyone compromise that.  It's ok if someone creates a VM that's specific to an OS, but such modifications I think should fall under the platform specific code files within Interpreter support code.  On the other hand any changes to the base interpreter code or non-hardware specific classes should be published so all images on all OSes can incorporate it.  I guess one thing I'm disappointed with is that the Windows version of Squeak (I haven't played with the Unix ones) doesn't allow you to create all of the hardware specific code.  That is, the WIndows version (at least the 1.3 release) still contains the primitive code in the goodies directory) under 1.23 and am having problems
generating a new (1.3) VM with your user primitive change set.  The interp.c
you ship doesn't seem to have the user primitive support functions (I can't
link my primitives against the current interpreter --- unresolved refs to
the functions declared in sqUserPrims.h).  So, I filed in the 1.23 user
primitive change set (from goodies) into the 1.3 Squeak and generated a new
interpreter with:

    Interpreter translate: 'interp.c' doInlines: true

I then recompile the VM with the new interp.c and my user primitives.  The
resulting executable dies on start up with a Segmentation Fault in the
BitBlit code.  I haven't tried to debug it yet... But....

Am I missing a step here? And, are you planning to compile and ship your 1.3
port with user primitive support?

--
Todd Coram (Maroc Ddot)
tcoram at BLaCKSMITH.com | tcoram at pobox.com

Sardonic slaughterer of sacred cows.





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