Hi David, Hi All,


On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 4:19 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 07:00:30PM -0400, Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:
> > On 2014-06-17 6:56 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:
> > > Generating VM builds for general distribution on build.squeak.org is
> a Really
> > > Bad Idea. Please do not do that.
> >
> > Can you expand on this, please? Why is it such a Very Bad Idea?
> >
>
> The authors and maintainers of the VMs for various platforms put a lot
> of time and effort into producing reliable products, and in trying to do
> so in such a way that they have some reasonable chance of answering
> questions
> when things do not work. Setting up a random bunch of undocumented and
> unsupported
> variations on those VMs makes life difficult for the people who are
> creating
> and supporting them, and especially so if those undocumented distributions
> are being served from a site that has "squeak.org" in its name.
>
> It's great to experiment, but let's have some consideration for the authors
> and maintainers of the VMs, and let's be careful that the things that we
> present to the world on squeak.org have real credibility and the best
> possible
> support.
>

I'm not so concerned in this case because it looks like it is just a
repackaging of a prebuilt VM.  What would be nice is if this approach is
documented and replicated for other distros.  Then we have something we can
allow distro maintainers to take wen they want to build an install artifact
for a particular distro (if that doesn't sound hopelessly circular).

Of course there are still issues, glibc version being one of them, whether
to use the threaded heartbeat or the itimer one, etc.  But I have no
objection to folks taking the tarball and munging it to produce something
that installs nicely.  In fact I think its a good thing, as Chris' original
complaint pointed to.

Personally I would approach support with a "this is unsupported but the
following people have had success on the following platforms" approach.
 That's honest.  I only provide support for VMs to Cadence customers.  I
try and provide working VMs but I'm in no position to provide support.
-- 
best,
Eliot
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