On 7 January 2017 at 04:31, Dale Henrichs <[email protected]> wrote: > Stef, > > RE: why they "cannot install Pharo" --- I'd guess it is because Pharo > requires 32 bit libraries and those are not available in the current Linux > releases by default ... to install the 32 bit libraries requires sudo > privileges and students aren't going to be able to do it themselves and the > sysadmins aren't going to want to have to add 32 bit libraries to a bunch of > linux machines just for pharo ... just a guess . > > Dale > > > On 01/06/2017 05:38 AM, Stephane Ducasse wrote: > > Hi pharoers > > I want to share with you my experience with trying to use Pharo at the > University here on Linux. > I think that they are on Ubuntu and ... the sys admin told me that they > cannot install Pharo :( > Since I'm not expert in Linux install I cannot help ;( > > So we will probably use windows. > Now they told me that what would be nice is to get a snap for Pharo > based on snapcraft.io. > > Does any of you have a snap description or willing to help so that we can > get > a snap for Pharo50? then for Pharo60?
Disclaimer: I haven't ever developed a snap package, so this is just my understanding, no experience! Damien has already mentioned Docker, which may be a good solution - I'm not familiar enough to comment on the differences other than I expect that a snap package would be lower overhead. Snap packaging is being developed by Canonical, the maintainers of Ubuntu. The touted advantages over existing packaging formats such as ppa's include: - Applications are sandboxed, increasing security (the are known limitations with X11, but this is the goal) - All dependencies can be included in the package - this gets back to what Dale was saying about the 32 bit libraries, they could be included in, and limited to, the snap package. Having said that, I don't know if snap packages support 32bit applications. - They're cross platform. The snap runtime has been ported to many of the major linux distributions, e.g. fedora, arch, gentoo, etc. - They're supposed to be fairly easy to develop (compared to ppa's). If Pharo can be made to work as a snap package it would probably be a good replacement for the ppa (eventually, older OSs won't support them). Cheers, Alistair
