[Vm-dev] Help/advice tracking down a squeak-vm regression

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Tue May 8 14:52:23 UTC 2012


On Tue, May 08, 2012 at 02:39:45PM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> 
> 
> On 08.05.2012, at 14:21, David T. Lewis wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On Tue, May 08, 2012 at 10:44:26AM +0100, Alex Bradbury wrote:
> >> 
> >> David and Igor: thanks for your responses. Comments below.
> >> 
> >> On 7 May 2012 00:28, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> >>> If I remember correctly, Scratch derives from a Squeak 3.6 image and uses
> >>> a VM of similar vintage. Since the days of Squeak 3.6, there have been
> >>> a number of fundamental changes in the Squeak VM. I recall some discussion
> >>> of this perhaps a couple of years ago, and I think that the prevailing
> >>> view was that it made more sense to bring the Scratch image up to date
> >>> with respect to the VM changes, as opposed to trying to make a single
> >>> VM that could be backward compatible all the way to Squeak 3.6.
> >> 
> >> Though the current squeak image did work flawlessly in squeak-vm 4.0?
> >> So the upstream view is that this is not officially supported and the
> >> correct solution if it no longer works on 4.4 is to just use an older
> >> vm?
> >> 
> >>> From a license point of view, is there any reason that the Scratch VM
> >>> and source code could not be distributed on Debian? If this is acceptable,
> >>> then I expect that the fastest way to achieve a working distribution would
> >>> involve arranging for Scratch to run using a VM at e.g. /usr/bin/scratch,
> >>> and Squeak to run with /usr/bin/squeak or /usr/bin/cog.
> >> 
> >> It does seem that the Ubuntu packages bundles its own
> >> scratch_squeak_vm. Either that, or supporting the installation of
> >> squeak-vm 4.0 alongside 4.4 might be good options. For my purposes
> >> with the Raspberry Pi, I'm probably just going to install and pin the
> >> squeeze squeak-vm (4.0) until a better solution comes along.
> >> 
> >> Alex
> > 
> > On 8 May 2012 10:44, Alex Bradbury <asb at asbradbury.org> wrote:
> >>> Though the current squeak image did work flawlessly in squeak-vm 4.0?
> >>> So the upstream view is that this is not officially supported and the
> >>> correct solution if it no longer works on 4.4 is to just use an older
> >>> vm?
> >> 
> >> squeak image -> scratch image
> >> 
> >> Alex
> > 
> > As far as I know, Scratch images have not worked on standard Squeak VMs
> > for a number of years, and Scratch has always relied on shipping its
> > own VM. In addition to fundamental changes in the VM itself that have
> > taken place in recent years, I believe that the Scratch version of the
> > VM also includes a couple of plugins (add-in functionality) that are
> > required for Scratch but not included in Squeak.
> > 
> > I think I see one source of confusion here. I just read the link at
> > http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Source_Code and find the following statement:
> > 
> > "Since Scratch simply uses a stock Squeak virtual machine, we are
> >  not distributing the Squeak virtual machine source code. Both the
> >  source code and pre-compiled binaries for the Squeak virtual machine
> >  are available at www.squeakvm.org."
> > 
> > Unfortunately, I don't think that this is true, and hopefully someone
> > can make a correction to that web page.
> > 
> > The squeakvm.org code repository along with VMMaker at source.squeak.org
> > does contain fully versioned copies of the Squeak VM, presumably including
> > all or most of the code in the current Scratch VM (except for the Scratch
> > specific plugins). So it would probably be possible to build a working
> > Scratch VM using code from the standard Squeak VM repositories. But
> > I fear this would take some work on the part of someone who knows
> > Scratch well enough to find and build the right versions and put the
> > pieces together.
> > 
> > Dave
> 
> Well, actually, Scratch (based on Squeak 2.8 IIRC) worked fine up to the 3.10 VM. E.g. OLPC's Scratch package does not bundle a VM but uses the stock Fedora Squeak VM (3.10).
> 
> For a very long time we managed to keep VMs being able to run all Squeak images back to 1.x. The promise was new VM + old image = fine, but new images may require new VMs. Upgrading the VM should not unnecessarily break old images.
> 
> So what did we change in 4.x VMs that it does not work anymore? 

I am not certain, but we will need to figure it if it is causing problems
now for Scratch and Debian. I probably will not be able to look into
this myself until next week though.

I know that I can run a Squeak 3.6 image on the most up-to-date
SqueakVM, but going back further in time gets problematic, and it
definitely is not possible to run a 1.x image on current VMs.

My recollection (not necessarily correct) is that the mechanism for
delivering events from the VM to the image was changed in a fundamental
way. There would probably also be some issues related to the special
objects array and primitive number assignments.

I think there was some discussion of this on the vm-dev list a
couple of years ago, and some related emails with John Maloney at
the time. I don't have a link right now, but I'll see if I can
find it.

Dave

> 
> If these changes are really unavoidable and incompatible, then we should indeed advise distros to package both 3.x and 4.x VMs.
> 
> - Bert -
>



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