Dear Squeakers,
As a long term Linux user let me add a couple of remarks to the
discussion.
"The Linux way of doing
things focuses on the super old school UNIX mentality that the person
using
the system knows what they're doing better than any program or developer
can guess, and so the power, and responsibility, is in your hands."
This do not apply to e.g. Ubuntu.
"How do I get <insert_program_name_here> to run?"
isn't really a question for the squeak community if you're on a Linux
machine."
IMHO there are two separate questions to address:
1. "How do I get Squeak to run on Linux?"
2. "How do I get Squeak to run on <put here any Linux distro>?"
The Squeak community should address only the first question and it
should do it with the One-Click Image. If there are any Linux users
around, who want to maintain packages in some distros, let them do it,
and help them with that. Then you can link to their work, when the
question concerning a particular distro arrives. Some links for
potential maintainers:
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/new-maintainer.html
https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/PPA
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=2
"You cannot claim to support Linux because Linux is not an operating
system but only an operating system kernel."
IMHO it is false, but a part of it is true :-P
Yes, Linux is only an operating system kernel, but does it mean you
cannot claim to support the kernel? I think you can. Additionally you
can claim to support Linux with X Window System. And it is more or less
what Squeak does in the One-Click image afaiu.
"In order to support a Linux distribution you need to compile the VM
against the library versions that the distribution uses."
Well, it is desirable, but not strictly necessary.
"Real support for Linux (distributions) would be a lot of work: build
and test the VM for a multitude of Linux distributions (there are
hundreds if not thousands of them) and for many versions of each. Every
variation of involved library in any involved (incompatible) version."
And it is not the task of Squeak developers to do that. It is the task
of each distribution's package maintainers (which of course might be
the same people, but in different roles). Squeak developers are
something called "upstream" :-P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstream_%28software_development%29
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