etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository

[Albert Cahalan]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 9:47 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Smalltalk community is puzzled that anybody would
> prefer to work on Smalltalk in something other than Smalltalk.

Unless you want to rewrite emacs in Smalltalk... :-)

> No point. Anybody who wants to can extract the source code from an
> Etoys image and create the objects you desire. That is the point. You,
> and apparently some of the Debian people, are complaining about two
> things, as far as I can tell.

Great. Do that, and THROW AWAY the Etoys image.
I gather that you can't do this though, which is the problem.

> One is that the Etoys people haven't given you a directory tree of
> text files including appropriate makefiles that would recreate the
> entire Etoys image, bit-identical to what they ship. I'm happy to
> discuss that, since creating those files would apparently let Etoys go
> into the Free repository.

Yes.

> The other complaint is that all of the tools for working on
> Smalltalk source are written in Smalltalk, except for the
> bits to be compiled in C.

Nope.

You'd be all set if you had Smalltalk source code that you
could feed into any random Smalltalk system to create
your build tools.

While I happen to like C, and it's a very popular way to
achieve the required ability to bootstrap, it isn't needed.
You even get a certain amount of respect from writing
the whole thing in Smalltalk. Use GNU Smalltalk.

You might even scrape by with Squeak building itself.
(not involving "copy the currently running image")
If you can create a new image from loose UTF-8 text
files and standard media files, without any data being
swiped from the currently running image, then you've
met the requirement.

> http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/squeak/oopsla_squeak.html

That's in interesting read. It does admit to depending
on a system image from decades ago:

"Alter the ST-80 SystemTracer to write an image in the new format."
"no longer needing to port images forward from Apple Smalltalk"

> What is the source management system for the Etoys and Squeak VMs? Is
> _everything_ done in Smalltalk and kept in the image file? Wait, I see
> it. http://www.squeakvm.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/. Albert?

That appears to be the OS interface layer. No problem there.
Feel free to write that in Smalltalk instead though.

> As far as I am concerned, you should write any such tools in
> Smalltalk/Squeak, and offer that source code to anybody who demands a
> translation to another language. No, I'm wrong, not a problem. We can
> translate it to C ourselves. There you go.

I don't see any reason to demand a specific other language,
or even any other language at all. I can see a reason to want
portable code (example: runs on Squeak and GNU Smalltalk),
to eliminate paranoia about a malicious compiler, but this isn't
critical. The really important thing is an ability to generate
everything from source. That means you can create a new
image without grabbing bits from an existing image.