[squeak-dev] Ubuntu package maintainers help

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Sun Apr 19 21:26:31 UTC 2009


On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>wrote:

> On 19.04.2009, at 20:03, Matej Kosik wrote:
>
>  Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Even Debian did not object to the licensing anymore - it's in non-free
>>> because they do not like the idea of purely image-based development.
>>> Which is one of the reason why I'm only shooting for VM packages for now.
>>>
>>
>> This approach does not make sense to me. What is the point of including
>> Squeak VM to Debian without image(s) and sources? It would mean that
>> half of the things is distributed in one way (through Debian
>> repositories) and other things (images & sources) are distributed in
>> other ways (users have to hunt for right kind of image and right kind of
>> sources on the web). In my opinion, this approach is chaotic.
>>
>> Including Squeak VM to Debian repositories could have been done anytime.
>> I did try to do that because it alone makes little sense (my opinion).
>>
>
>
> In my opinion it does, and it solves the hardest problem first (see my
> reply to Subbu).
>
> Going for all-or-nothing just prolongs the current undesirable situation
> unnecessarily. I'm proposing to go step by step. Of course, the people
> actually doing the work will decide on their own which path to take.
>
> - Bert -


IMO the most sensible thing to include in a linux distro is a VM with a
minimal headless scripting image that has the capability of loading packages
to build whatever image one might want.  This would allow one to write
#!/bin/squeak scripts against some minimal base.  But there is a lot of work
here:
- defining an elegant or pleasant to use file system interface instead of
the rather broken one we have now (FileDirectory and FileStream have a
horrible API, verbose, unintuitive, incomplete; file streams are slow (no
buffering))
- defining a base scripting library (i.e. defining something minimal that is
useful in a scripting context and well-designed enough to last)
- providing python-quality documentation and breadth of functionality


But I'm saying this largely in ignorance of 3.10 and lack of experience with
Rio which definitely looks to be a step in the right direction re verbosity.

2¢
Eliot
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