etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository

[Albert Cahalan]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> Am 24.06.2008 um 20:04 schrieb Albert Cahalan:
>
>> I'm glad that Debian didn't break the rules for etoys.
>> You're claiming to be open source, yet you've LOST the
>> source code decades ago. Hacking up binary images is
>> shockingly horrible software non-engineering.
>
> Sorry Albert, this just shows your shocking ignorance.
>
> *All the source code* for *every* piece of byte code in the
> image is available, and not only that, we even *ship* it

No. This is not true. You ship a binary blob. That doesn't
count, even if so-called "source code" is viewable from
within the blob.

It's not source code unless I can:

a. build a bit-for-bit identical image from it (aside from timestamps)
b. edit it with an editor of my choice
c. manage it with svn, git, or anything else
d. diff it with standard tools
e. patch it with standard tools

>> GNU Smalltalk is built in a relatively normal way. OLPC could
>> ship that instead, assuming that Smalltalk is desirable.
>
> It is not Smalltalk that is desirable, but Etoys. I'd be very interested to
> hear of equivalent software packages.

Unless you can separate Etoys from Smalltalk, you sure
do desire Smalltalk. If you had source code, you could just
use the GNU Smalltalk interpreter.

Fortunately, you do have the possibility of recreating your
long-lost source code. You can mostly regenerate it from
your binary blob, then rewrite the bits that didn't survive.