Hi Holger, I heartily agree with you that this is an important issue. In talking with @ronsaldo this morning he wrote
"The painful change is building all of these third party dependencies with cmake. And cmake is not suitable at all for doing this. I would like to remove these third party dependencies on the near future, but for doing this we need a server for holding them."
and I replied
I think the best thing to do is to a) have a directory in each build.foo* which includes the pre-built support libraries b) have a separate repository to build the support libraries c) a workflow where when a new version of a library is needed one checks out repository b) and builds, and then replaces the libraries in a) and commits. That is what I'm doing with Terf. See terf-cogvm/platforms/Cross/third-party/lib.macos32x86 & lib.macos64x64.
And he agrees.
So was soon as possible we should split the repository to create e.g. opensmalltalk-third-party and stop rebuilding third-party software unnecessarily. We do have to decide where the products live on opensmalltalk-vm. I propose that they live in build.*/third-party/lib