Markus,

Markus Gaelli wrote:
> He installed it on some machine in Israel :-) using some scheme-shell 
> script. I am very bad with shell scripts so I actually tried to fork the 
> images using OSProcess, but as this was not ready for prime time for 
> OS-X the last time I tried, I was ending up trying to build some VMs for 
> Mac with OSProcess included

I think that going back to these shell scripts is really an option.
They are probably only a few and not very long (2..20 loc).

There are enough people on this list with unix know how who might help 
out with ease. They surely are willing to answer beginner level 
questions as they are related to the Squeak development work.

In a shell scripting language you have control structure, simple 
variables, sometimes arrays and dictionaries and tests.

The basic pattern is mostly something like

command -option1 arg1 -option2 arg2
theNextCommand arg

and so on. Perhaps in the end even not so differen from keyword messages
sent to an object. The problem is that the commandline syntax of the
different tools is different ;-). There are of course a lot of arbitrary 
conventions which make the thing cumbersome.

However I still suggest that you rescue the scripts and post them here 
together with the questions what you don't understand in the script code.
I have to say that I am not a shell programmer as well but I have done
certain things in the past.

In any case let's at least have a look at these test scripts before 
deciding against them.



> Though we did some progress with the help of David T Lewis, Ian Piumarta 
> and John McIntosh, I am actually not sure, on which Mac-VM OSProcess is 
> running now, with which features of OSProcess included and which 
> missing. David, John, Ian?

Having Squeak as the testbed (Integration and system tests) might be 
fine in the future, but for the time beeing it is probably not yet worth 
the effort as very basic things  are on the todo list.

1) Install an image
2) Create a .st startup file
3) start the image
    ->the image reads the st file with the test commands and
      executes them
4) if all tests run fine the image stops itself
5) otherwise the controlling shell script kills the process after a 
certain time out period
6) the results are mailed to the testing group and periodically (once
    a week) to the list.


A question is where to have a test server? It would be fine to have a 
dedicated bar bones machine (e.g. SUSE or redhat preinstalled).

But for testing the testbed first I am sure that on this list there are 
poeple who might help out. It is more a matter of having the test 
documents (describing how the tests are conducted) and the test scripts.

I myself work on Windows XP most of my time. My Unix knowhow is not so 
active as it could be.

Hannes