[squeak-dev] Squeak Oversight Board minutes ??? 10/18/11

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Thu Oct 20 01:05:54 UTC 2011


On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 07:53:32AM -0700, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> 
> The problem we discussed is that the packages with most linux
> distributions are *not* the CogVM yet (rightfully so).  So we are trying
> to address the issue of "get vm from packages, get image from
> squeak.org".

The challenge is finding people with the knowledge and long term
commitment to support the various Linux package distributions.
This is not an easy thing to do, and I suspect that it requires
a significant amount of work from anyone who might volunteer for
one of those roles.

Assuming that we can find people willing and able to take the
package maintainer roles, then we would want to encourage those
people to build and distribute from sources that are recent enough
to support the Cog image format (specifically, that would be
October 2010 or later in the case of a standard VM). The sources
should come from an upstream provider (either Ian's tarball or
equivalent from Eliot or Igor).

If that can be achieved, then we will have no problem with running
the latest Squeak image on any of these distros. But getting
people to serve in the distro maintainer role may be a big challenge,
as it is a lot of work that probably does not come with a lot
of appreciation.

So my summary would be that there are no real techical impediments
at all, but maybe an opportunity to define a distro maintainer
role and to make sure that our community gives some appreciation
to anyone willing to step forward and take on the hard work of
building, packaging, testing, answering questions, soothing license
anxieties, etc.

For someone taking on a distro maintainer role, all we can offer
by way of compensation is fame, glory, and the appreciation of a
few million users. It ain't much, but it ain't nothing either.

Dave




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