[Vm-dev] VMMaker updating: Mantis 6828 and the future of copying files

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 27.05.2008, at 20:33, tim Rowledge wrote:

> OK, two issues here, one shortterm, one longer term.
>
> a) in mantis 6828 Dave Lewis proposes some changes to fix some  
> 64bitness issues. They look good to me and he added tests. However  
> I'm not responsible for unix vms and I'm not about to commit those  
> changes.  Somebody else will have to handle that and close the  
> mantis report etc.

Ian added Dave's VMMaker patches already, so I assume he'd merge these  
things, too. OTOH if we were to drop the FileCopyPlugin, we would not  
need to update it, right?

> b) I'm reasonably sure that all the platforms we are interested in  
> now support file links of some sort. File copying (and the vile  
> FileCopyPlugin may it be cursed to the bottom of the pits of Vista)  
> was only ever used because we had no linking available. Eliot will  
> cheerfully (I'm sure) rabbit on for hours about how we used to  
> handle things in the brouhaha source tree, where sets of files for  
> particular platforms were assembled by links from the assorted  
> subsystems, thus making it easy to make. Or even nmake.
> It would be really nice to agree a path towards a brighter future  
> where VMMaker doesn't have to copy files and worry about damned  
> permissions/attributes/flavours/whatever. Thoughts please?


Bury it I'd say. Who was using it anyway?

Btw, I think it would be nice to revive

	http://www.squeaksource.com/VMMaker.html

Also, some idea about how to handle plugins development-wise would be  
nice. The unix VM now ships several non-default plugins (DBus,  
GStreamer, Rome, maybe more) that one has to download from different  
repositories. Maybe the source for those should be added to the  
VMMaker repo? Or added to SVN? Maybe even a whole VMMaker image?

- Bert -