> This is what you get for trying to make a binary that just works on any x86 Linux distribution. It won't work. Vendors don't like it, Linus doesn't like it, RMS hates it :) The proper fix to all of this problems would be to provide distribution specific packages. I know that's a lot more of work and many more people should be involved into this, but how hard can it be? Any piece of software aimed to linux has packages for most popular distributions, so it is doable. And once you provide a decent package, vendors may take over it and make it official and maintain it for you.
> I could do the Slackware package.
excellent
what we should do is that the package is automatically created using jenkins.
Sure! Please note that Ian Piumarta, the maintainer of the original
(stack) VM for unix did provide packages for RedHat and Debian systems
early on. There are still packages for the latest VM for RedHat/Suse?
on [1].
I think Matej Kosik, José Luis Redrejo and others took the labor of
building a license clean squeak-vm packages, which got accepted by
Debian [3] and Ubuntu [4]. I'm not sure about their current status and
do not know about other distributions.
I don't think that projects like the linux kernel, gnome or whatever
all build packages for every linux distribution that's out there. It's
true that there is a different demand after the linux kernel than
after the squeak-vm. But we still have limited resources and can only
hope that squeak/pharo/cuis keeps attracting people, so that they get
included in some distributions.
The cog VM might be the standard VM inside the pharo/cuis/squeak
communities, but it's still experimental and only for x86. So there is
the question how to integrate the cog vm/stack vm both into eg. the
debian distribution that is also targeting amd64, mips, mipsel,
powerpc, s390, s390x, sh4. You can't just provide a new squeak-vm
package that contains the latest cog vm.
Alex
[1] http://www.squeakvm.org/unix/
[2] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-March/126624.html
[3] http://packages.debian.org/de/sid/squeak-vm
[4] http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/squeak-vm