[Vm-dev] Fwd: Nix package for Pharo flavor of opensmalltalk-vm

[Luke Gorrie]

On 20 April 2017 at 09:59, Luke Gorrie <luke at snabb.co> wrote:

> On reflection I will split up my packaging work into "vm" and "image"
> components. I will send the vm upstream ASAP. I will leave the images on a
> development branch, perhaps indefinitely, because I am not sure that I am
> on the right track there at all.
>

On further reflection it is possible that I am on the wrong track with the
VM packaging too.

Pharo upstream are distributing releases as binary vm+image pairs with some
third party libraries included. The most faithful way to package this for
nix would be to take these binaries and make them work (using patchelf to
fix up the shared library paths.) This is how people package other binary
software for nix e.g. Skype.

The advantage of this approach would be to faithfully reproduce the
software as it is released from the Pharo project. This way nix users would
expect the software to work equally well as on Ubuntu or Fedora, say. This
would also ease support because Pharo upstream would never be bothered by
users having problems due to my packaging e.g. using the latest VM with an
older image release if that is not supposed to be supported.

The disadvantage is that this does not suit my own use case. I want to
develop a Pharo application, deploy it with nix, and support it myself. The
binary releases are too opaque for my taste and I don't want to work with
them. In this context I see a net benefit to building everything from
sources and tracking all the dependencies explicitly on the nix level. So I
would continue to use this source-based packaging myself, and I would not
be interested in spending the time to package up the binaries for other
people.

So - I need to rethink whether I am the right person to maintain the
generic pharo packages for nix. (Could be that I should instead treat this
as an opensmalltalk-vm packaging that is "use at own risk" with pharo
images.)
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