[squeak-dev] What is the Squeak VM binaries location and
configuration?
Chris Muller
ma.chris.m at gmail.com
Tue Sep 6 22:21:16 UTC 2016
Hi all, one of my workmates (who is a Smalltalk veteran) just asked me
how to run a Spur image I had given him. That this question needs to
be asked by someone like him should tell us something about our
current VM accessibility, but the fact I was unable to give him a
straight answer, even moreso.
Shouldn't it be obvious enough even for newbies, but there are so many
plausible answers to this question which are simply incorrect:
- squeakvm.org is only for old interpreter VM; totally misleading
to a newbie.
- It *does* have a reference to the "Unofficial and experimental
"Cog" virtual machines" which leads new users to:
http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/VM/
whereupon we have "lattest" and "stable". Great!
- Not great, because those are actually old too. So squeakvm.org
is just a wild-goose chase, ha ha sorry newbie.. :(
- Sigh, okay, so what about squeak.org --> Downloads? Surely
there's a recent VM there?
Well, selecting the Linux (x86) link lets me download
Squeak5.1-16548-32bit-201608171728-Linux.zip. However, this file
organizes the VM in a totally non-standard way (everything under /bin,
no /lib directory), so I didn't want to point him to that one, because
we have existing scripts which assume the legacy organization and I
don't want to wrestle with installation / configuration issues.
- SO, I was about to let him him in on the github whipper-snapper
secret that only a few, In-The-Know Squeak Elites know about, myself,
learned only a couple of days ago!
https://bintray.com/opensmalltalk/vm/cog/#files
but its this massive jumbled list of a hundred or more tar files. I
can sort them by name, and *I* can find the right VM tarball for
myself, but how to tell someone else? Searching that web page for
"linux32x86_squeak.cog.spur" will find just 12, from which I can
select one of the many generated all in the same day? So is there
still a "stable" version?
Whew! So,
1) what is the best answer for my workmate, and
2) how can we make this easier?
Thanks.
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