2012/1/11 Milan Mimica <[email protected]> > > The proper fix to all of this problems would be to provide distribution > specific packages. I know that's a lot more of work and many more people > should be involved into this, but how hard can it be? Any piece of software > aimed to linux has packages for most popular distributions, so it is doable.
Sure! Please note that Ian Piumarta, the maintainer of the original (stack) VM for unix did provide packages for RedHat and Debian systems early on. There are still packages for the latest VM for RedHat/Suse? on [1]. I think Matej Kosik, José Luis Redrejo and others took the labor of building a license clean squeak-vm packages, which got accepted by Debian [3] and Ubuntu [4]. I'm not sure about their current status and do not know about other distributions. I don't think that projects like the linux kernel, gnome or whatever all build packages for every linux distribution that's out there. It's true that there is a different demand after the linux kernel than after the squeak-vm. But we still have limited resources and can only hope that squeak/pharo/cuis keeps attracting people, so that they get included in some distributions. The cog VM might be the standard VM inside the pharo/cuis/squeak communities, but it's still experimental and only for x86. So there is the question how to integrate the cog vm/stack vm both into eg. the debian distribution that is also targeting amd64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, s390x, sh4. You can't just provide a new squeak-vm package that contains the latest cog vm. Alex [1] http://www.squeakvm.org/unix/ [2] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-March/126624.html [3] http://packages.debian.org/de/sid/squeak-vm [4] http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/squeak-vm
