"Brian Zhou" <brian_zhou at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi Squeakers,
> 
> I'm looking at the "Building the Windows & Unix/Linux VM" wiki page, I can
> follow the steps and build the VM just fine. But I have some questions
> regarding "why":
> 
>  * Looks like an image is needed if you really want to start from scratch,
> for (re-)generating interp.c etc.
>  * In order to use the image of course you need a VM
> 
> So, how does the first Squeak VM/image got bootstrapped? Using some other
> running Smalltalk-80?

Yep, check out the essays "Back to the future" by Dan Ingalls etc. It is
explained there.

> Is it true that the current image = original Smalltalk-80 image + changeSet1
> + changeSet2 + ...? What is the pros and cons of using image binary vs.
> Smalltalk text source for maintaining the objects? I'm quite used to the
> "cvs update; ./configure; make" dance. There must be some reason
> Smalltalk/Squeak chose this way. I even remember someone on the list saying
> "file system is evil", but why?
> 
> IMHO, the image binary approach pretty much determines you can only start
> with a large image stripping down, instead of starting from minimum and
> modularly build up. Does anyone have a stripped-down mini.image while still

Well, the problems with the monolithic image are being adressed in the
growing modules system which is due "any day now" to start to appear in
the update stream. When fully enabled it will among other things give us
the possibility of building images by loading modules ontop of a tiny
kernel - no more "stripping voodoo" hopefully.

It is a BIG change to how Squeak works and we are discussing and
building it piece by piece.

A tip though: If you want to participate in this area - do read up on
the problems at hand first. It's one complicated beast...

regards, Göran