[IAEP] etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

Yoshiki Ohshima <yoshiki at vpri.org> writes:

>> The gist of the argument is that one can't currently know what's
>> really inside an etoys image, except beyond what it itself tells us,
>
> BTW, do you now agree that this was not true?
>
> If you give me an image file and ask me "why the word at offset
> 0x12345 in the file is 0x89ABCDEF?", I can answer that by opening the
> image file externally with InterpreterSimulator, examine the bits and
> answer something like "this is a second slot of an Array that points
> to a number object, and the array is pointed to by this, this and ths
> object.", etc.

Yes, that sounds much better (from a security/trust point of view)
than having to ask the virtual machine itself to introspect.  It
stills seems somewhat too low level to enable version control.  (Back
in the early 90's, when I wrote Smalltalk code for a living (sort of),
we ended up having to use external system ("teamwork/envy" IIRC) to
get decent version control and reproducible builds.)

It may be a useful exercise to run this over the whole etoys image to
identify those parts that are recompilable from the .source/.changes
files, those that represent plain data that could be serialized, and
perchance surprise objects whose existence was only known to Alan Kay
or Adele Goldberg back in the 80s. :-)

- FChE