Looks like have to apologise for being silent too ;-)



> On 2022-08-21, at 7:17 AM, Phil B <pbpublist at gmail.com> wrote:
> Work completed:
> 1) I have (or had... it worked as of late last year) working multi-arch packaging for i386/amd64/armhf/arm64.  On x86, side-by-side installs of i386 and amd64 packages were confirmed working. (I don't recall if side-by-side ARM 32- and 64-bit versions were working yet or not)
> 2) Thanks to Dave's changes to the classic VM repo, all VM packages can co-exist.  This should provide roughly the functionality of the all-in-one packaging in terms of being able to run the majority of images in use out there.
> 3) Given 1 & 2, the packages can be built and either manually installed or installed via a custom (Debian package) repo.

This is fantastic, and I have some idea of how much work it was, having just done some very basic package building.

> Work remaining to be done:
> 1a) I was beginning work with Tobias and Marcel to make the (relatively minor, IIRC) changes needed to integrate the packaging work into the VM (github) repo.
> 1b) There was also a desire to include CI builds in the scope.  I don't recall how much there is to do for this.

I *think* this is probably doable, from talking with Marcel last week.


> 2) There are several (IIRC, 3) embedded libraries that need to be eliminated (i.e. switch to using the Debian package repo versions of the libraries) to comply with Debian packaging policies.  This does not appear to be entirely straightforward as the Squeak library versions are rather ancient and there's at least one custom patch to work around an issue with a library. (based on my preliminary research on the JPEG library, this is probably the largest bit of work remaining)

As I recall the main issue is the jpeg library, which we had to modify for... reasons. I'm not sure if anyone has subsequently checked whether more recent versions of the library work to our needs; that would be the nicest discovery.

We are bundling a 1998 version 6 of the jpeg so anyone feeling like digging into this might like to diff those sources and the current ones (apparently version 9e of 20220116) to tell us what has changed, or perhaps diff our copy with the 'official' copy to see what we changed. 

I see fdlibm as well - but what is the other one?


> 3) Once 2 is done, work with the Debian maintainer to get the packages included in the Debian package repos.  This will likely require some additional minor tweaks to make the maintainers happy.  This process will require some diplomacy as the package maintainers don't have a deep understanding of why Squeak does things the way it does and wanted some things that aren't possible... but initial feedback was encouraging that getting them on board is feasible.

Politics of software are always tricky. People can decide to spend a trillion dollars on invading Mars in ten minutes but agreeing on a new logo for an open source painting program will take a thousand people a thousand days.


> Given my availability currently, I could probably commit to helping finish item 1a in the near future (i.e. this year) if we just wanted to integrate what I have into the github repos.  It's items 1b, 2 and 3 that are difficult for me to commit to a timeframe on right now.

Thanks again for all that you have done so far. Now we need to find some more people...

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: RCR: Rewind Card Reader