On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 6:11 PM, Jeff Gonis jeff.gonis@gmail.com wrote:

Hi David and Stephane,

I sent David an email thanking him very much for this email on the squeak-dev list and I saw this message and I thought that maybe I could state what value David's email had for me, as a vote for David sending it.

I had in fact gone and looked at Mariano's blog and also the Deep Into Smalltalk vm course slides to work on building a vm, but I generally use the latest squeak image in my development, and in this image neither Gofer nor Metacello are present. Both of the resources that were listed explicitly place their instructions in the context of operating inside of a Pharo image and using Gofer, and so if you are not in a Pharo image, instead of working on getting a vm built you first have to work on figuring out how to get Gofer and Metacello up and running in your image. This can discourage you and eventually cause you to turn your attention to doing other development in the image which is what happened for me.

Gofer is not necessary. It was used just to download ConfigurationOfCog. You can take the Monticello Browser and download it by hand. Even more, you can use Installer in Squeak if you want.

David's instructions worked for the first time I tried them,

The problem is that the same instructions way not work in 6 months, since it is very easy that platform code is not in sync with VMMaker. Or even worst, some packages of VMMaker may not be in sync with other packages of VMMaker.

even being so thorough as to tell me how to deal with the merge window that popped up, and worked inside a Squeak image. Unfortunately, I attempted the same instructions from inside a pharo 1.3 image and came across several errors with what appear to be unsatisfied dependencies and a syntax error. So it looks like right now we are kind of stuck with a situation in which the instructions for building a VM differ between Pharo and Squeak.

Again, in 6 months the instructions can be obsolete because it may change the amount of plugins, or which ones go internal, which external etc. With CMakeVMMaker this is done for you. You don't need to be aware of which plugins you should compile etc.

But this is why David's email was so valuable, because the most clear directions for VM building for me were pharo specific,

There is nothing Pharo specific. All what is done from image side is to generate sources. Metacello works in Squeak, hence ConfigurationOfCog should work in Squeak. And CMakeVMMaker is quite platform independent. I didn't try it in Squeak, but I think it should work also.

and now there are instructions suited to Squeak that I can use. So I don't see his email as duplication but rather as providing the directions that I was unable to get from the other resources.

Completely agree with this. But nobody said the opposite. David's mail is really helpful, but Stef was asking something different: why not to take advantage of all the work Igor and company have already done? If you can make it work in Squeak, then you don't even need another way of building the vm.

Anyway, just wanted to put in my 2 cents on why I appreciated David's work so much.

+1

Thanks, Jeff G.