[Vm-dev] [squeak-dev] VM download location confusion

[David T. Lewis]

Esteban,

I do not know if the Mac Pharo VM is suitable for running Squeak, and I
cannot say if this has ever been tested. It is definitely not suitable
for running older Squeak images, and it would be hard to recommend it
for general use without some assurance that it has been tested. If you
can provide an update on this, it would be helpful (I do not have a Mac,
so I cannot help you with this).

The interpreter VM is used for running images that cannot be run on Cog
(i.e. image format 6504 images). Since three years, all interpreter VMs
have been able to do this. The interpreter VM for Mac is now so old that
it causes problems for people who expect the VM to "just work". This affects
Mac users who want to run Etoys, Scratch, etc.

In your earlier message, you said "I've ensured that all the changes I made
to the VM are also accessible to everybody that is willing to take it". The
problem is with "everybody that is willing to take it". That is the job of
the VM platform maintainer, and currently it is not being done.

Dave


On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 11:04:47AM +0200, Esteban Lorenzano wrote:
> some time ago I sent a proposal over this. 
> 
> in practice, we maintaining all platforms (mac, linux and windows) and the work is available to everybody (and is not just me: Igor, Camillo and Guille work on that too, a lot... and now is Clement doing some work too). And we did not fork, we maintain compatibility.
> 
> I didn't resign as mac maintainer, but I see no point on having a different build process that the one I have now (which relies on git, CMakeMaker and Jenkins), and doing it would predate my time (which is not much). 
> 
> I even tried to add this information into mac page of squeakvm.org (along with different links with the different available links), just to discover I do not have write rights anymore (probably lost in a server change). 
> 
> That. We are far so few to lose effort duplicating the work of others, and since I'm having a really bad day, please let me say it as a feel it, and I'm sorry if I offend your susceptibility: If you are going to continue ignoring my work just because I program with a different process and in a different environment, please tell me and I will stop losing my time sending mails to this list. 
> Otherwise, we are open for any contributions.
> 
> Esteban
> 
> On Oct 16, 2013, at 3:02 AM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 05:19:33PM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
> >> We have a fairly confusing story for downloading VMs at the moment, at least so far as I can see. I'm particularly referring to Mac VMs here, since I don't have any idea what the situation with Windows VMs might be.
> >> 
> >> squeakvm.org/mac  points to a cog vm that seems to date itself to 2010, or to an autobuilder for the pharo group at inria (which won't respond to me anyway). Eliot's blog site has a quite separate download folder. There's the jenkins autobuilder at build.squeak.org as well, of course.
> >> 
> >> We should probably have a better story than that.
> >> 
> > 
> > John McIntosh turned over responsibility for the Mac VM to a new maintainer:
> > 
> >  http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2010-November/155100.html
> > 
> > However, there have been no updates to the traditional Mac VM since 2010, and
> > the Mac VM is effectively unmaintained at this time.
> > 
> > Eliot Miranda continues to support Mac with his Cog VMs, and Ian Piumarta
> > provides a Unix VM that runs on OS X (X window required, see squeakvm.org/unix).
> > 
> > With the loss of Andreas Raab we also no longer have an official Windows VM
> > maintainer. As with Mac, Eliot provides Cog support for Windows, and Ian has
> > built a recent interpreter VM for Windows on squeakvm.org.
> > 
> > Branches of the interpreter and Cog VMs are separately maintained by the Pharo
> > group. These have diverged from trunk and I cannot say if they are compatible
> > with standard Squeak interpreter and Cog VMs.
> > 
> > The Jenkins autobuilder at build.squeak.org is not a source of supported VMs.
> > It serves only to verify the the integrity of the VMMaker source generation
> > process. For supported standard VMs, http://squeakvm.org is the definitive
> > site, with pointers to http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/VM/ for Cog.
> > 
> > Dave
> > 
>