[Pkg-squeak-devel] newbie in the squeak&debian world

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 25.01.2012, at 03:03, Pierre Boutillier wrote:

> Hi list,
> I am interested by having a correct framework in debian for squeak because I am part of the project physica-etoys[1] (that aims in particular to command a arduino board[2] in an etoys environment) and I would appreciate that it becomes a part of debian eventually.
> Anyway, I am not there at all yet. My concern for now is to understand :
> 1/ Why does the FTBFS remain? Does the patch of bug 634240 not apply? (Maybe I haven't been far enouth in this mailing list archive... I am sorry in this case)
> 2/ ftp.squeak.org provides debian packages for some (rather old) images and source. Why?
> Could these packages be (updated and) uploaded to official repositories ?
> 
> I am ready to help if necessary but I am not a debian maintainer so I will not be efficient in the beginning...
> Thank for reading and sorry first for my english and secondly if I could have found all the information somewhere on internet ...
> [1]http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira/projects/physical-etoys/
> [2]http://www.arduino.cc/

Yay! Updating the debian packages is a very good idea.

The debs on ftp.squeak.org is severely outdated. Versions earlier than 4.0 were not license-clean so they couldn't have been included. I'm not quite sure how these packages compare to the ones in debian.

An additional complication is that there are now multiple VMs - the original interpreter ("Squeak VM") and a jit compiler (called "Cog VM"). The jit is x86 only for now so there is a special interpreter (a.k.a. "Stack VM") that is compatible with the jit for non x86 platforms. Both the jit and the interpreter need to be installed at the same time to be able to run older images. The best way to package it IMHO would be to have two binaries in the package and the squeak-vm script chooses the appropriate one based on the image version. But because the jit is relatively new, not even upstream has this scheme in place.  

(disclaimer: I'm just an upstream developer, not involved in debian packaging)

- Bert -