S??verin Lemaignan has implemented support for named serial devices (e.g. '/dev/ttyUSB0'). My understanding is that this is an important feature for supporting SqueakBots for children in classroom settings, so it would be nice if we can incorporate this in the main VM distributions.
The Mantis bug report and S??verin's code are at http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7266. I added an update for SerialPlugin that allows the new primitives to be properly generated from VMMaker, and also changes the method signatures in SerialPlugin.h to resolve 64-bit issues, permitting SerialPlugin to work on 64-bit Linux.
Because of the changes to SerialPlugin.h, support code changes will be required for Windows an Mac as well as Unix. For this reason (assuming that we agree that the changes are a good thing), we will need to schedule a time at which the platforms and VMMaker changes can be updated within some reasonable time window ("reasonable" meaning over a period days or weeks as opposed to months).
Ian is away right now, so we should think about doing this at a later date, perhaps next month if schedules permit.
I should mention also that I think we have a number of issues like this that need coordinated updates (notably from my point of view the 64-bit FFI updates), and it would be good to do an easy one such as the SerialPlugin update in order to exercise the process.
Dave