[Vm-dev] vm executable name

K K Subbu kksubbu.ml at gmail.com
Wed Apr 12 07:26:34 UTC 2017


Hi,

The current practice of building all VMs (squeak, stack, cog, spur, ...) 
with the same executable name ("squeak") is complicating the task of 
building mimetypes, desktop launchers and binfmt auto loaders for 
different image files.

This overuse is leading to layers of wrapper scripts to disambiguate and 
match VMs to image files. An image is an executable file and it 
shouldn't be this hard to start it.

I propose that the executable 'squeak' be reserved for the classic VM 
only and use names like stack, cog, spur etc. for the newer VMs that use 
a different image format. If later, cog evolves to handle older image 
formats, then we can always copy (or link) it to 'squeak' name and have 
cog check for 'squeak' in its argv[0] to turn on backward compatibility 
mode.

If a newer VM cannot execute a magic file, then it should not share the 
same name as the older VM which does execute it.

Regards .. Subbu


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