Hi Christophe, On Wed, 22 Aug 2018 at 15:33, Christophe Demarey <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Alistair, > > > Le 22 août 2018 à 12:02, Alistair Grant <[email protected]> a écrit : > > > > Hi Christophe, > > > > On Wed, 22 Aug 2018 at 09:36, Christophe Demarey > > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> ... > >> > >> As a workaround for now, we are thinking to ship the pharo.version file > >> along with the image to avoid to run images with compatible VMs that we > >> cannot ensure they work well with a given image. > > > > Part of the issue here is that Pharo 7 is still in development. My > > understanding is that within the development cycle we assume that the > > latest VM is being used (if I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will correct > > me :-)). > > > > I don't use Pharo Launcher, so I'm not familiar with it, but it seems > > to me that for the current development version (currently Pharo 7) the > > launcher needs to ensure that it has the latest stable VM. > > You’re right but the problem is that Pharo Launcher has no way to know what > is the pharo version of an image before running it and evaluate a small > expression. To achieve that, Pharo Launcher uses a VM that is, at least, > compatible with the image format number. We do not have any guarantee that > the expression evaluation of the VM will work fine for all images. For now, > to detect the pharo version of Spur images, we use Pharo 61 VM. You can > assume it will work well for 6. images. What if we use the 70 VM to determine > pharo version of 6.* images? It will probably work better for Pharo 7 images > (assuming we use the latest 70 VM) but then, no guarantee it will work for 61 > images. > > The core of the problem is that we should not be forced to run an image to > determine its pharo version. Nevertheless, I think it would be good to use > the latest available VM for a given image format to determine its pharo > version. It should work in most cases.
Thanks very much for the explanation, it makes sense now. My understanding is that the Pharo 7 VM is backward compatible with Pharo 6.1 (for now). Esteban's process is to release a new stable Pharo 7 VM, and then a month later upgrade the Pharo 6.1 VM as well. Of course, that will be superseded by the availability of pharo.version. Thanks again, Alistair
